“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.”

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.

They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.

We didn’t have cable TV. We just couldn’t afford it. But you don’t need cable to watch the Masters. In 1997, at the exact moment I started out, I watched Tiger Woods win the Masters.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.

Justice is never given; it is exacted.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

There’s nothing better than having an experience now that’s the exact same thing.