“A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.”

All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.

I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.

Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.

It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.

I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.

It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.

The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.

And now I am ready to keep running When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death. I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest Where, beyond every essence, a new essence awaits.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

I’ve always regretted that I’m made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.

A couple of incidents of shortness of breath and checked myself into a hospital, but that one in France really sat me down for a few minutes.

When I was on my hunger strike, and I was in a hospital, the guards who inflicted all manner of injustice against me, and all manner of hardship…

So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.

I learned to knit in hospital. They give you stuff to do to keep you busy because you’re so ill.

Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.

I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.

I try to make myself do things for other people when I’m feeling down. Like, you can call your local hospital and help out in the pediatric unit.

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.