Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.

Everything is good . . . as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses they run in span.

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.

Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.