To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

Whoever wants to accomplish great things must devote to a lot of profound thought to details.