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"Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels."

"The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The …"

"Francis must rank with those creative personalities to which all the deepest developments of Christian consciousness are due."

"Of course I thoroughly agree with you that Christianity was from the first essentially a mystical religion; to me, the doctrine of the New Testament is only intelligible from that standpoint."

"Hence the most scientific classification is a rough-and-ready business at the best."

"There's a lot of bastards out there!"

"I have merely attempted to put the view of the universe and man's place in it which is common to all mystics in plain and untechnical language: and to suggest the practical conditions under which ordi…"

"Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy."

"Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feeling…"

"Meekness and temperance or as we may quite properly translate, Humility and Moderation, - the graces of the self forgetful soul - manifest not in some peculiar and supernatural spiritual manner, but i…"

"It is a lonely and arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their obvious charac…"

"It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and discipline should be needed for this: that it should demand of you, if not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the virtues of the golf cour…"

"To tell the truth, I myself never quite feel that I know what I am talking about — if I did, and when I do, the thing written seems nothing to me. However, what I do write and allow to survive I alway…"

"My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. … it filled me with soul satisfying joy."

"William Carlos Williams page at The Academy of American Poets"

"Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard."

"Of asphodel, that greeny flower,"

"Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle."

"In summer, the song sings itself."

"The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the more perfect your union with the world of growth and change, the quicker, the more subtle your response to its countless sugestions; so much…"

"Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infini…"

"The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets…"

"No nation is truly defeated which retains its spiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which does not emerge soul unstained."

"True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations : quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other."

"The redeeming character of Franciscan enthusiasm-it's ability to change, brace and expand the most unlikely spirits and impel them to exacting discipline and selfless work-are fully shown in her. ."

"The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic."

"Recollection, the art which the practical man is now invited to learn, is in essence no more and no less than the subjection of the attention to the control of the will."

"When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense e…"

"Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcendi…"

"For years your treasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really count" , or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and thither your heart perpetually …"

"I liked this because of the elimination of the essential in the composition. I cut it down and down, and down. This squeezed up to make it vivid."

"There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small machine made of words."

"Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment."

"Why do we live? Most of us need the very thing we never ask for. We talk about revolution as if it was peanuts. What we need is some frank thinking and a few revolutions in our own guts; to hell with …"

"Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those who "keep themselves to themselves," and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have truly never known."

"I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my …"

"Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave…"

"Because of that corporate life, transfusing you, giving to you and taking from you - conditioning you as it does in countless oblique and unapparent ways - you are still compelled to react in to many …"

"As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transc…"

"It is in tune with the tempo of life — scattered yet welded into the whole, — broken, yet woven together."

"The mystics aim is not the suppression of life but it's intensification,"

"The helm went down hard and we just cleared the rocks.Otherwise it would have been the end of this poor craft. Our ancient skipper, who was responsible for the error in pilotage, is now wearing what i…"

"Even the power which lurks in every coal scuttle, shines in the electric lamp, pants in the motor-omnibus, declares itself in the ineffable wonders of reproduction and growth, is supersensual."

"One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfec…"

"Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance."

"The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realised it he is not a complete human being, he has not …"

"Going forth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world of high contemplation, you will find stored for you, and at last made real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblest experi…"

"As it is not by the methods of the laboratory that we learn to know life, so it is not by the methods of the intellect that we learn to know God."