Wilfred Owen

If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.

All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.

All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.

All a poet can do today is warn.

Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

She is elegant rather than belle.

I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.

Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill.

As bronze may be much beautified by lying in the dark damp soil so men who fade in dust of warfare fade fairer and sorrow blooms their soul.

When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to-it leaves nothing.

When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to - it leaves nothing.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.

Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.

I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?

The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.