As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.

The secret of success is sincerity.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.

A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

Ask any soldier. To kill a man is to merit a woman.

Men don't deceive their wives unless they love them. When they love them most, they deceive them. It's a form of fidelity, their deceit.

The brave men die in war. It takes great luck or judgment not to be killed. Once, at least, the head has to bow and the knee has to bend to danger. The soldiers who march back under the triumphal arches are death's deserters.

The older we women grow, the more clearly we see what men really are: hypocrites, boasters, he-goats. The older men grow, the more they doll us up with every perfection.

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

Im not afraid of death. Its the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.

Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.

Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.