Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.