The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Everything we touch in our daily lives, including our body, is a miracle. By putting the kingdom of god in the right place, it shows us it is possible to live happily right here, right now.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Sleep is all about recovering. So if you’re not sleeping, you’re not recovering. And if you’re going to break your body down a lot, you better find ways to build it back up. And the only way to do that is get a lot of sleep. So for me, I go to bed at like 8:30, 9:00. As soon as I put my kids to bed. Because I’m up at 5:30 the next day.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

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

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.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

Physical elegance, which is what I am talking about here, comes from the body. This is no superficial matter, but rather the way that man found to honour the way he places his two feet on the ground.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

Death means change our clothes. Clothes become old, then time to come change. So this body become old, and then time come, take young body.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately… you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

Stand a little less between me and the sun.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

You can’t keep your mind on fighting when you’re thinking about a woman. You can’t keep your concentration. You feel like sleeping all the time.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

The ‚soul‘ is one of the words you can use to talk about your innermost being, the essence of who you are.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

I don’t digest things with my mind.

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.

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

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Hallow the body as a temple to comeliness and sanctify the heart as a sacrifice to love; love recompenses the adorers.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Purity of speech, of the mind, of the senses, and of a compassionate heart are needed by one who desires to rise to the divine platform.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.