“‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.”

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

You have to let other people be right’ was his answer to their insults. ‘It consoles them for not being anything else.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.

The funny thing about love is that it must continually grow or it will diminish.

What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.

Envying another man’s happiness is madness; you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you had it.

Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned.

Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Painters and poets have liberty to lie.

I’m a drunk poet; and I guess maybe I sipped too much of what I couldn’t buy of her.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Too much is written by the men who can’t write about the men who do write.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Poetry is the loveliest art. It has a wretched way of revealing our own character when we think we are judging the poets.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.