1. “Hunger allows no choice.”
2. “Weep for the lives your wishes never led.”
3. “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
4. “A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”
5. “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
6. “Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
7. “Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.”
8. “See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.”
9. “Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
10. “Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.”
11. “Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.”
12. “The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”
13. “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”
14. “To be free is often to be lonely.”
15. “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.”
16. “Good art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.”
17. “The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.”
18. “Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.”
19. “The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
20. “Poetry is the only art people haven’t learned to consume like soup.”
21. “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
22. “Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”
23. “Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.”
24. “Money cannot but the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.”
25. “No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.”
26. “A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.”
27. “Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.”
28. “Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.”
29. “Criticism should be a casual conversation.”
30. “A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
