“no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”

“Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a se...”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still ...”

“When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.”

“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adoles...”

“He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz”

“Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is th...”

“The world is a mirror of ourselves.”

“There is but one reality, that is true -- but the two of you experience it in slightly different ways. The older you get, I should think, the more you will come to understand that the universe is v...”

“Knowing the self is the biggest truth. If we find the truth within, we have found God.”

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

“What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.”

“Speak you too,speak as the last,say out your say.Speak-But dont split off No from Yes.Give your say this meaning too:Give it the shadow.Give it shadow enough,Give it as muchAs you know is spread ro...”

“What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.”

“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”