“Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”

The thoughts of others were light and fleeting, Of lovers’ meeting Or luck or fame. Mine were of trouble, And mine were steady; So I was ready When trouble came.

Stars, I have seen them fall, But when they drop and die, No star is lost at all From all the star-sown sky. The toil of all that be Helps not the primal fault; It rains into the sea And still the sea is salt.

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad.

Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.

I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.

I think that to transfuse emotion – not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer – is the peculiar function of poetry.

Good religious poetry… is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

White in the moon the long road lies.

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover; Breath’s aware that will not keep. Up, lad: when the journey’s over then there’ll be time enough to sleep.

The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can; Not I: let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me.

There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

Tomorrow, more’s the pity, Away we both must hie, To air the ditty and to earth I.

It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes.

There can be no ‘graduated exercises in drawing’ leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

I can draw really well. And I like to paint. I’m a bit of an artist.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.