“If one by one we counted people out, for the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long to get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.”

Never cut what you can untie.

Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.

Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.

Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever’s going. Not against: with.

The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of learning.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true.

The only certain freedom’s in departure.

I ache with everything in me to make it count, so that when I finally cross the finish line, I’ll hear the words, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.

Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.

No amount of reading or memorizing will make you successful in life. It is the understanding and application of wise thought which counts.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country’s injustices and contradictions down on paper.