Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.
Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.
The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.
Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.
We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in infomation?
The only wisdom we can hope to acquireIs the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man
There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.
April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. ‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? ‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.
So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.
LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.
Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..
Someone said, ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.
Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every moment.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood–Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The backward look behind the assuranceOf recorded history, the backward half-lookOver the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended
And right action is freedom from past and future also.For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. “The Dry Salvages
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decayNo greater is than we.So why, Love, should we ever prayTo live a century?The butterfly that lives a dayHas lived eternity.
Under the penitential gatesSustained by staring SeraphimWhere the souls of the devoutBurn invisible and dim.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
I don’t know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god
music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, butyou are the musicWhile the music lasts.
A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.
Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.
Footfalls echo in the memorydown the passage we did not taketowards the door we never openedinto the rose garden. My words echothus, in your mind
Though you forget the way to the Temple,There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death
What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
We have only to conquer Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.Now is the triumph of the cross.
To country people Cows are mild,And flee from any stick they throw;But I’m a timid town bred child,And all the cattle seem to know.
Believe me, Michael:Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.
They constantly try to escapeFrom the darkness outside and withinBy dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.But the man that is shall shadowThe man that pretends to be.
Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
The world turns and the world changes,But one thing does not change.In all of my years, one thing does not change,However you disguise it, this thing does not change:The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
We ask only to be reassuredAbout the noises in the cellarAnd the window that should not have been open
To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.
What the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
Between the desireAnd the spasm,Between the potencyAnd the existence,Between the essenceAnd the descent,Falls the Shadow.
And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.
If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
For he will doAs he do doAnd there’s no doing anything about it!
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
Your burden is not to clear your conscienceBut to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.
About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.
A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything)
This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.
Thus with most careful devotionThus with precise attentionTo detail, interfering preparationOf that which is already preparedMen tighten the knot of confusionInto perfect misunderstanding.
There is nothing at all to be done about it, There is nothing to do about anything.
Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question…