Poems List

To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.

It's unthinkable not to love --you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

To know and know that you know, not to know and know that you don't know, that is to know.

I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.

A person's right to be human outweighs anybody's human rights to be religious.

Leadership is always about how YOU lead YOURSELF. The rest comes as a natural result of that. Would YOU follow YOU?

You are an infinite SOUL enjoying the wonderful illusion of a solid BODY in a beautiful physical World.

To ACCEPT something and suffer is to become a victim. To accept that something is AS IT IS and then let it go or say no is to be ENLIGHTENED.

We SEE things OUTSIDE of ourselves but we are practically BLIND to the Beauty and Power from WITHIN.