“What can be explained is not poetry.”

I’m looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.

Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is, A child’s laughter, a woman’s kiss.

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.

The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.

God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Though leaves are many, the root is one.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

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

Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

It’s very hard not to be condescending when you’re explaining something to an idiot.

No need to erase no need to explain. The beauty is in the change.

I can’t explain it, but from the first day I stepped into a wrestling ring, I knew that one day I was going to be a big superstar. I knew that one day I would be the NWA World Heavyweight Champion like my hero, Lou Thesz.

In acting process, it’s very difficult to explain. It’s something very intimate, very private.

To say that the universe was here last year, or millions of years ago, does not explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to the question of the origin of things, man can only wonder and doubt and guess.

America is like a dog. I’m sorry, but it is. It cannot understand actual words. It understands inflection. It understands fear. But you can’t actually explain issues to a dog.

I was in disbelief that I’d just explained my dreary life to this bizarre, beautiful boy who may or may not despise me.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy–a vice which yields no return?