“If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.”

If something’s just, I’ll let myself be hacked to bits for it.

They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things. They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.

When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!

When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.

Respectable people, What bastards!

Everything is only a dream.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.

The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.