A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.

There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

A poem should not mean but be.

Thinking of only the worse of yourself will eventually destroy you

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.

Damn all false dichotomies to hell

An essential idea is that if you give to some person or endeavor in life, you will make that more important.

In difficult times, people just like to hear music. They like to be moved by what they hear. And music speaks different languages.

Problems almost always create opportunities - to learn, grow and improve.

All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire.

If you'll have enough saved and nobody has to take on debt and you want to retire, shoot go for it.

It's in your hands to make the world a better place.