The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.

...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.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.