Others

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from where it comes.

Common sense is a realized sense of proportion.

Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth.

An ounce of patience is worth more than tons of preaching.

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation; nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation; nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

There was a man in our town, And he was wondrous wise; He jumped into a bramble bush And scratched out both his eyes.

Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knickknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life.

One good thing about music When it hits you You feel no pain.

You don’t need a weather man To know which way the wind blows

I love the sound of the bone against the plate and the fortress-like look of it lying before me in a moat of risotto, the meat soft as the leg of an angel who has lived a purely airborne existence.

And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

A word after a word after a word is power.

It goes like this The fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing verse, what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

These palms are greater than Versailles, for no man made them.

Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.