Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
War among men defiles this world.
Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.
It has frequently been said that we never desire what we think absolutely inapprehensible: it is however true that some of our sharpest agonies are those in which the object of desire is regarded as both possible and imaginary.
I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.
There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall
Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman -But who is that on the other side of you?
Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.
O father, father Gone from us, lost to us, The church lies bereft, Alone, Desecrated, desolated. And the heathen shall build On the ruins Their world without God. I see it. I see it.
If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: