There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.

It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.

When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all.

Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life.

Weightless in water, swift as the wind, Subtle of purpose - a feather blown - I go with my oarsmen where they will, My beautiful body and theirs all one.

The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.