Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.

Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.

I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.

Men expect too much, do too little.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark and then the towering weak and pale.

There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.

The dreary flies lazy and casual Stick to the ceiling buzz along the wall. O heart the spider shuffles from the mould Weaving between the pinks and grapes his pall.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

In the little hall leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers, tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper. The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

Some of you may have been hoping that today I would speak about Lucien Bouchard's latest economic theories. But I have decided to spare him for the time being: after all, he is a man.

I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

I know my theories and findings are hard for you to accept because they are so original and extraordinary.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

Theories pass. The frog remains.

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

And the continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

I think the point to be understood is that we're all different. I've never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn't go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, 'This is the way you should act.'