Business today consists in persuading crowds.

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

We must learn to suffer more.

The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.

Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.