Around around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.

There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

A poem should not mean but be.

I've never gone for having a great voice, for cultivating one. I'm still not doing it now.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

True peacefulness comes from abandoning the illustion that satisfying desires brings pleasure.

Those who speak always and those who never speak are equally unfit for friendship. A food proportion of the talent of listening and speaking is the base of social virtues.

You and I could paint the sky together. As the world goes by, we'll go on forever.

It's better to live cherishing a dream than face the possibilty that it might all come to nothing.

Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story.

I look forward to continuing the debate about Britain's future - in Parliament and across the country.

You only see the top of a lily pad, but if you pull the lily pad out of the water, it has roots and tangled weeds and all the stuff that comes with it.