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.

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.

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.