Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.

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

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.

Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Christians should never fail to sense the operation of an angelic glory. It forever eclipses the world of demonic powers, as the sun does a candle's light.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

I have met with some of them - very honest fellows, who, with all their stupidity, had a kind of intelligence and an upright good sense, which cannot be the characteristics of fools.

What we're doing is fun - if you have any sense of humor at all!

It was frightening because it was the first time I had gotten a sense of how serious the problem was. It became clear from his notes that he felt the president himself was involved.

Nothing is more pleasing and engaging than the sense of having conferred benefits. Not even the gratification of receiving them.

You've got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity.

My music is so often like a lullaby I write to myself to make sense of things I can't tie together, or things I've lost, or things I'll never have.

I am not this big celebrity, but it gets really crazy. You have to go through the nuts of blowing up, in a sense, and then figuring out how to live your life with that.

It's not so much the amount of tax we pay - it's the sense that our pocket's being picked without our knowing what's going on.

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.

From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.

I feel lazy when I'm not working. I learned all my business sense from my dad. He always believed in me, and I think the last thing he said to me before he passed away was, 'I know you're gonna be OK. I'm not worried about you'.

Reducing the budget for Amtrak makes no sense unless the Administration is prepared to implement a reform strategy which can be supported by the budget request.

By obtaining a sense of its place in the unfolding drama of life, set in an ecological theatre, so we can understand why it has become one of the leading players.

There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

Happiness is the real sense of fulfillment that comes from hard work.