Quotes to inspire and reflect

You command continence; give what you command, and command what you will.

There is no salvation outside the church.

Tolle lege, tolle lege.

Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee.

When he was reading, he drew his eyes along over the leaves, and his heart searched into the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.

Give me chastity and continency—but not yet!

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Art is born of humiliation.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

A poet’s hope: to be,

History to the defeated

But who can live for long

A shilling life will give you all the facts.

Some thirty inches from my nose

I and the public know

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,

O what is that sound which so thrills the ear

This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,

Private faces in public places

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

About suffering they were never wrong,

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Look, stranger, at this island now.

In the deserts of the heart

Time that with this strange excuse

Intellectual disgrace

In the nightmare of the dark

Poetry makes nothing happen.

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

To us he is no more a person

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

To save your world you asked this man to die:

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

The main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavours, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.