All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.

Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.

How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.

To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.