“Animals don’t even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. The conscious impulse to change one’s appearance is found only among humans.”

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

I’m drowning in papers.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.

Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

Man comes not from an egg but from an animalcule that is found in male sperm.

I have often endeavoured to view the circulation of the blood in terrestrial animals, but without success, by reason that no parts of their bodies were sufficiently transparent.

A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.

I bought a box of animal crackers, but there was nothing inside. They’d eaten each other.

Stones grow, plants grow, and live, animals grow live and feel.

A bird in The Strand is worth two in Shepherds Bush.