All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

I'm drowning in papers.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

Such certainty is beautiful but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Its just not easy to explain to someone else what you dont understand yourself.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One cant get lost here.

Gimme: an agreement between two losers who can't putt.

I can do whatever I want. They will tell me if what I am doing is stupid or a total waste of time. I may tell them that they are wrong, and we will come to an agreement.

There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.

We had an eyeball-to-eyeball agreement at a restaurant before I came back that, if I came back, he would never talk to me that way again or I was simply saying no.

Fashion is a social agreement. the result of a consensus of a large group of people.

If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

The agreement to place the binational planning group at our new Northern Command was also signed in December.

I mean that the time where we need International agreement more than ever on the environment and the rest, poverty we are breaking up our International Institutions and the rule of law and Tony Blair is part of it.

Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement.

There is no reason why agreement on particular points should not be both possible and advantageous to the so-called neutrals and to one or more of the blocs, either existing or in the process of formation, within the League of Nations.

It is a rare piece of legislation indeed where there is so much agreement about the goals.

I believe that Orthodoxy has been thinking lately, and despite other impressions, that we can't have full sacramental communion if we don't first have a fundamental agreement on the question of the primacy, that still isn't there.