Our responsibility to ourselves comes first -- because in a sense what one is oneself is the responsibility that one has for others!

Nobody can afford to appear more pleasant than they really are!

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

the unfortunate thing about worldliness is that its rewards are rather less than its appetites.

Human beings don't show, any more than cities at dusk, their real necessities! And yet if you looked -- past the circle of outside lights, through the street walls still standing -- into the want and emptiness within!

The only creative power I know is that of what might roughly be called 'love'; not of course a sentimental love: a far more impersonal and less individual emotion. I sometimes think that migratory birds may have it for each other. They fly in the same direction, and have never been seen to interfere with each other's flights.

artists are exposed to great temptations: their eyes see paradise before their souls have reached it, and that is a great danger.