A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Error is always more busy than truth.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

I read poetry to save time.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

I spend a lot of time reading.

We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.

The cautious seldom err.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

After many years of great mercy, after tasting of the powers of the world to come, we still are so weak, so foolish; but, oh! when we get away from self to God, there all is truth and purity and holiness, and our heart finds peace, wisdom, completeness, delight, joy, victory.

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

We should take care not to make the intellect our goal; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

He that won’t be counseled can’t be helped.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.