A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

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

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.

Education is hanging around until you've caught on.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Nobody was ever meant, To remember or invent, What he did with every cent.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.

The best way out is always through.

To be social is to be forgiving.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

The only certain freedom's in departure.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

I go to school the youth to learn the future.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.