What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
Love is always being given where it is not required.
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.