E. O. Wilson Quotes

Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing.

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

The world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.

The elemental world we all live in is the darkness of the body.

In my opinion when you speak about relationships between people, you are actually talking about everything in their world because everything is contained in that relationship.

Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow the world.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.

The world we are born into-this complicated, difficult, hauntingly touching world-is the one whole thing. It is the world we awaken in, and awaken to.

Art matters because it is the one true great connector in a world that seems to be very unconnected.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel - a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

I call animals "guardians of Being," especially animals that live with humans. Because, for many humans, it's through their contact with animals they get in touch with that level of being.

Each the others world entire.

It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.

I am in the Aleph, the point at which everything is in the same place at the same time. I'm at a window, looking out at the world and its secret places, poetry lost in time and words left hanging in space...sentences that are perfectly understood, even when left unspoken. Feelings that simultaneously exalt and suffocate.

What we apparently have failed to grasp is that, in this new world in which we live, the collective hunger of great masses of people, wherever they may be, will affect our long-range welfare, just as though they were our own people.

Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.

The power of the world always works in circles.

Prosperity knits a man to the world.