Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.

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His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

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Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

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Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

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A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

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He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.

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Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

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I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

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Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

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We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

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