The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

Smiles are the language of love.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.

Children always turn to the light.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

No one but a fool is always right.

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for?

In the '70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

Surely our job while we're here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

The one thing that 'Via Dolorosa' has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.

You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

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.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.