It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.
Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
…Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man, Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire; Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted; Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God; Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal, Less than we fear the love of God.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions Guides us by vanities.