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