Poems aren't postcards to send home.
The true way to soften one's troubles is to solace those of others.
It is with many enterprises as with striking fire; we do not meet with success except by reiterated efforts, and often at the instant when we despaired of success.
There is an important difference between love and friendship. While the former delights in extremes and opposites, the latter demands equality.
Contempt is the only way to triumph over calumny.
Pleasure and pain, the good and the bad, are so intermixed that we can not shun the one without depriving ourselves of the other.
Delicacy is to love what grace is to beauty.
The best prayers have often more groans than words.
You need to be distracted.
We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.
I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.