I never question God. Sometimes I say, ‘Why me? Why do I have such a hard life? Why do I have this disease? Why do I have siblings who died?’ But then I think and say, ‘Why not me?’
Then
If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.
In 1889, I predict, the legislative stage of the Irish question will have arrived; and the union with England, which shall then have cursed Ireland for nine tenths of a century, will be repealed.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
When people lack teachers, their tendencies are not corrected; when they do not have ritual and moral principles, then their lawlessness is not controlled.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley’s translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.
First our pleasures die – and then our hopes, and then our fears – and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust – and we die too.
Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.
Your mind, which is yourself, can be likened to a house. The first necessary move then, is to rid that house of all but furnishings essential to success.
Attack those concepts such as ‘third world.’ Think about it. If we look at it in terms of numbers, then people of color are the majority in this world. We should be the ‘first world.’