Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.

The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life.

Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.

Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral.

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.

As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.

At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.

Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

I think that if there are positions that you can't argue... then the responsibility is probably to resign. If one's own conscience is opposed to the requirements and responsibilities of the job, then it's time to leave the job.

We cannot appeal to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.

Maybe I'll learn how, but the only thing I can do is turn down parts that would hurt my conscience.

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

When your conscience says law is immoral, don't follow it.

It wouldn't sit easily on one's conscience that you had been warned and there could be danger, but nevertheless you went ahead and said let's dispense these drugs.

Claiming for ourselves liberty of conscience, liberty to worship, we shall see to it that every other individual enjoys the same right.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Living with a conscience is like driving with the brakes on.

No, moral conscience is one thing, the law is another. We have to hold onto this difference.

God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.