A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God.
Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
In the present ubiquity of ignorance, one cannot but suspect that many who call themselves Christians do not understand what the word means.
It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
Some who would vigorously repudiate Christianity are more Christian than many who maintain it.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
To be conscious is not to be in time.
We may say that religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature.
What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
When a term has become as universally sanctified as 'democracy' now is, I begin to wonder whether it means anything.