Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

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

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.

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