People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.

Hatred destroys the person who hates.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.