“Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.”

“Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.”

“Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.”

“The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.”

“The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth”

“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in meOlder and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.”

“I've changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore,Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,You see me there.”

“To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing.”

“To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand yearsWill Hardly leach,” he thought, “this dust of that fire.”

“Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.”

“In pleasant peace and security How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die He shall look up above the stalled oxen Envying the cruel falcon, And dig under the straw for a stone To bruise himself on.”