If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.

Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.