The lawn is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return gently at twilight, gently go at dawn, the sad intangible who grieve and yearn.
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.
You now have learned enough to see that Cats are much like you and me and other people whom we find possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad and some are good and some are bad and some are better, some are worse – but all may be described in verse.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted, a problem to be met with ambush and stratagem, enveloped or scattered.
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
This love is silent.
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.
The True Church can never fail for it is based upon a rock.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
People find a way in which they can say something. “I can’t say it that way, what way can I find that will do?” One didn’t really bother about the existing modes.
