Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

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

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

Meditation is a vital practice to access conscious contact with your highest self.

A lot of people tell me a lot of things about my conduct, my game, my future… but I try to stay away from their words of wisdom. I don’t let it distract me. On the field, you will be facing the ball alone. If you fail, you will the only one to blame. So, you should be the one deciding for yourself.

To live is to think.

I’m aware that, whatever the circumstances, there will always be speculation about me.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.

Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch – which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

I’m constantly thinking.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

If I have something to say, I want it to be meaningful.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

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

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

I’m sorry my existence is not very noble or sublime.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.

It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.

A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

I try to lead by example, being conscious of others and being responsible.

I owe my solitude to other people.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

I really have no interest in myself.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.