“Away with you, water, destruction of wine!”

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how can that be? I know not, but I feel the agony.

It is difficult to suddenly give up a long love. Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem

Give up wanting to deserve any thanks from anyone, or thinking anybody can be grateful.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more.

Now Spring restores the balmy heat, now Zephyr’s sweet breezes calm the rage of the equinoctial sky.

I hate and I love, and who can tell me why?

So a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she dear to her own; when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.

For the godly poet must be chaste himself, but there is no need for his verses to be so.

Who now travels that dark path from whose bourne they say no one returns. [Lat., Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum Illue unde negant redire quemquam.]

I write of youth, of love, and have access by these to sing of cleanly wantonness.

But you shall not escape my iambics.

My mind’s sunk so low, Claudia, because of you, wrecked itself on your account so bad already, that I couldn’t like you if you were the best of women, -or stop loving you, no matter what you do.

To whom do I give my new elegant little book? Cui dono lepidum novum libellum?

We see not our own backs.

I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power.

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two.

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.

Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct.

I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains.

Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.