Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!

All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper - just running down the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something'.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

I am overcome by my own amazing sloth...Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?

Sometimes it seemsas though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.

All the untidyactivity continues, awful but cheerful.

Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

The war dragged on, as wars tend to do.

I write because there are things in me that cannot die.

On Tony Gwynn: it was a wonder that such an exuberant man could be so patient.

The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.

We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.

Paint ideas, paint thought.

Shall we not go on in so great a cause? Go forward and not backward. Courage, brethren; and on, on to the victory!

The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.

Work? It’s just serious play.

Numbers have life; they’re not just symbols on paper.