We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can’t be much good.
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.
In the last few years everything I’d done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.
You have now learned to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind.
To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
What is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place.
What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
Genuine blasphemy genuine in spirit and not purely verbal is the product of partial belief and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
Should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
What we call the beginning is often an end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape not from our own time – for we are bound by that – but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
Birth copulation and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
Philosophy – the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree.
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.
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 poet’s mind is … a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
April is the cruellest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and desire stirring dull roots with Spring rain.
April is the crudest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing Memory and desire stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them.
I suppose some editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
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.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.