Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
Home is where one starts from.
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.
You are the music while the music lasts.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
So the lover must struggle for words.
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.