What is man but his passion?

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.

Do not be afraid to be kind

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.

All children have creative power.

If you are an intelligent human being then you are interested in climate change because it's the most important issue of our time.

What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love...They're the guiding lights of a life.

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

Any problem is an opportunity. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.

The curse of marriage That we can call these delicate creatures ours And not their appetites!

If the nation is rich but people are poor, the country cannot be strong, and society will be unstable.