Poems List

I'm much more proud of being a father than being an actor.

The President...should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves the country best.

I have never seen anyone like him. He was the beau-ideal of a soldier and a gentlemen.

Anne Frank was a very lively girl and always wanted to draw a lot of people around her and wanted to be the centre of attention.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.

Our power is not so much in us as through us.

To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind's eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.

The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. the Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep.

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.