To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.