We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.