"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they..." - Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

“One has been a poor spectator of life if one has not witnessed the hand - that kills from mercy.”

“He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable.”

“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.”

“We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936”

“The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.”

“But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”

“A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.”

“In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.”

“What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.”