It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
The young feel tired at the end of an action; The old at the beginning.
In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
What is actual is actual only for one time, and only for one place.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
Philosophy - the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree.
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
