Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

In nature there are few sharp lines.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can't keep your mind off.

Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

Only silence perfects silence.

I have a very big conflict with the individualization of love. I feel like it's egotistical to just love one person when you can love so many of them. I feel so much love that I declare myself a lover of all.

At 10 A.M. on the Friday after the election in 2010, David Cameron's team met in his room at the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza Hotel. Cameron was clear that, unable to form a majority government, they had to begin talks with the Lib Dems about forming a coalition. But in a rare example of strategic discord, George Osborne disagreed.

I'm not a complicated person.

I think the stress of being No. 1 in the world is more of a motivating factor for me just because I don't want to lose it.

He who hesitates is lost

We recognize the distinctness of Asian art when we turn to its traditional forms, recognize it as Japanese, Chinese and Indian, even Balinese or Thai.

I learned to walk as a baby, and I haven't had a lesson since.

Sometimes those who don't socialize much aren't actually anti-social, they just have no tolerance for drama and fake people.

So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.

Mountains are like stationary fountains of serenity.

We're loving something to death in a way, which Americans tend to do a lot.

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

Suspense is irksome, disappointment bitter.

I go to work the minute I open my eyes.

The mirror to the beautiful is beautiful.

We're on the verge of a financial collapse unless we balance the budget, and that means some really, really tough decisions.

If you don't show care and love for your children and leave the mothers to take care of all their needs, if they grow up, they will also not consider you.

If you go into science, I think you better go in with a dream that maybe you, too, will get a Nobel Prize. It's not that I went in and I thought I was very bright and I was going to get one, but I'll confess, you know, I knew what it was.

Film and television is just a different technique in terms of how to approach the camera but basically the job is the same; but what you learn as a craft in theater, you can then learn to translate that into any mediums.

Strong convictions precede great actions.

The higher you climb on the mountain, the harder the wind blows.

We must get rid of fossil fuels by developing injection systems for automobiles, which can run on bio-fuel.