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.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

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.

This love is silent.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

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.

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?

You are the music while the music lasts.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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.

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.

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.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

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.

Home is where one starts from.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

The most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.

Obviously, when you're up against somebody you don't like there's extra motivation, but I don't think any person going for an Olympic gold is going to put friendship first.

We are all trying to achieve our dreams.

I can't change my personality. I'll always smile, but I'll be more focused.

Prosecutors say it would be next to impossible to get one teen to testify in court that another had slipped him or her a copied disc at lunchtime. And besides, isn't sharing music a time-honored part of teen friendship?

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.

Drinking water that does not meet a federal health guideline will not necessarily make someone ill. Many contaminants are hazardous only if consumed for years. And some researchers argue that even toxic chemicals, when consumed at extremely low doses over long periods, pose few risks.

Some officials overseeing local water systems have tried to go above and beyond what is legally required. But they have encountered resistance, sometimes from the very residents they are trying to protect, who say that if their water is legal, it must be safe.

A huge amount of success in life comes from learning as a child how to make good habits. It's good to help kids understand that when they do certain things habitually, they're reinforcing patterns.

Fraudulent and improper payments have long bedeviled Medicare, a $466 billion program. In particular, payments for durable medical equipment, like power wheelchairs and diabetic test kits, are ripe for fraud.

Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.

Many environmental advocates argue that agricultural pollution will be reduced only through stronger federal laws.

Since cowardice must occur at a time and place where an enemy either has already appeared or may yet turn up, servicemen in peacetime - and ordinary civilians - can breathe a sigh of relief. If you are yellow-bellied back home, you're not technically a coward.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.