Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

The laws of God, the laws of man he may keep that will and can; not I: let God and man decree laws for themselves and not for me.

I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic.

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Life to be sure is nothing much to lose. But young men think it is and we were young.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.

When families observe a later, deeper stage of cult involvement they may find it necessary to consider the involvement of a professional such as myself in an intervention effort.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Some gods may cross your path, but why should gods be beautiful? They could also be frightening.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.

People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.

Since love first made the breast an instrument Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart Was molten to a mirror, like a rose I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang This mirror in your sight.

This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle - among others - that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error.