Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.

The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?

There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.