Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.

Violence is an expression of impotence.

It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.

in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origins notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. this is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition.