Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; whatfrom the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.