The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;
All I have is a voice.
Poetry makes nothing happen.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a yo...
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it we...
In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.
I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should go their way a...
To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to inter...
Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned...
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fat...
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.
I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.