He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
‘Healing,’ Papa would tell me, ‘is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.’
We live here. We lie in the Present’s unopenedSorrow; its limits are what we are.The prisoner ought never to pardon his cell.
So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. 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.