Richard Wilbur Quotes

All men owe honor to the poets - honor and awe; for they are dearest to the Muse who puts upon their lips the ways of life.

Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

Everything you'll ever need to know is within you; the secrets of the universe are imprinted on the cells of your body.

There is a god within us.

We all have an edge. We all are floating our psyche on top with a great ocean underneath.

I'm just kind of odd. There are dark forces in the world, and if you pay attention to what's going on around you, you end up incorporating it into the storytelling. Maybe it's some aspect of myself that's coming through that people are seeing, that I am in fact a quiet psycho.

Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine - but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.

The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

Dreams must be heeded and accepted. For a great many of them come true.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.

The Bible must be considered as the great source of all the truth by which men are to be guided in government as well as in all social transactions.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

If we don't have souls then who am I talking to when I keep telling myself to be good?

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

It's only when we're relaxed that the thing way down deep in all of us - call it the subconscious mind, the spirit, what you will - has a chance to well up and tell us how we shall go.

I think that Bible principles will help anybody.