That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough.

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

The last hour from midnight had lost half its quarters, and the stars went lifting up the great minutes.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair, and left my necktie God knows where. And carried half way home, or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer.

I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways.

I suppose reggae has always been a hopeful way to protest, and just because the world's tragic doesn't mean it's not beautiful.

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.

When I was a kid, it was a huge insult to be a geek. Now it's a point of pride in a weird way.

I like being challenged. That's the only way you grow.

How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.'

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson's. There's no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.