Poet Quotes

In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.

Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

The blind date that has stood you up: your life.

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.

Friendship is inexplicable, it should not be explained if one doesn't want to kill it.

Where two take counsel there is no lack of plans.

Virtue herself is her own fairest reward.

Take the word of experience, I speak the truth: inaction is safest in danger.

Make haste! The tide of Fortune soon ebbs.

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?