A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.
A mule will work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once.
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth....
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
There is no such thing as was--only is.
