To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

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

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.