How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

I’m not an expert on the arms race.

True happiness is… to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

The racing is quite boring, sometimes. It’s hard to see how it pulls in fans.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

First and foremost comes my family and my life with Brad. We have so much joy in raising our children and teaching them about the world that nothing really compares to that.

A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

Once you start a working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.

You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy.

Right now I’m just delighted to be alive and to have had a nice long bath.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

To live happily is an inward power of the soul.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

We moralize among ruins.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

I’m nobody, who are you?

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

My life turned out to be beyond my greatest dreams.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.