“Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.”

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

Poetry is a very complex art, It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

It doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

Liberty is not a right but a duty.

Good art however ‘immoral’ is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.