Poet Quotes

"Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene."

"People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way."

"As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow."

"One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do."

"I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction."

"The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears."

"All the best stories are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape."

"Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste."

"When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory."

"Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping."

"Man, an animal that makes bargains."

"A well begun is half ended."

"I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this."

"The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

"And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man."

"Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

"Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man."

"That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again."

"I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat."

"Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think."

"The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in."

"Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young."

"Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed."

"Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act."

"Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions."

"If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act."

"In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning."

"I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word."

"Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write."

"The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic."