It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

Art is born of humiliation.

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

Now is the age of anxiety.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.