Quotes by Poets

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
Mary Oliver
How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?""Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ...
Barbara Kingsolver
Some men break your heart in two,Some men fawn and flatter,Some men never look at you;And that cleans up the matter.
Dorothy Parker
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
Let not the rash marble riskgarrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,in many words recallingname, renown, events, birthplace.All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.Let not the marble say what men do not.The essentials of the dead man's life--the trembling hope,the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--will abide forever.Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continuewhen it is the lives of others that will make that happen,as you yourself are the mirror and imageof those who did not live as long as youand others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.
Jorge Luis Borges
The dreadful dead of dark midnight.
William Shakespeare
I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of ImaginationImagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more. The Apostles knew of no other Gospel.
William Blake
The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others".
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Even the snow melts, let alone the frugal regards of a soul confident in its own eternity.
Sorin Cerin
The only depth where I can breathe, and don't need to fight for air, is in your love.
Anthony Liccione
Truth will never shine from a heart filled with corruption and lies.
Suzy Kassem
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it will be a fish.
Ovid
Life has pounded me downand thrashed me around,Time and time again,But I always get right back up,Because I still love life -Just as the earth still lovesThe rain.
Suzy Kassem
The lunatic, the lover, and the poetAre of imagination all compact:One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare
We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable.
Maya Angelou
What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyesWould, with themselves, shut up my thoughts...
William Shakespeare
This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.
Hal Duncan
Today is the blocks with which we build.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Whenas in silks my Julia goes Then then methinks how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes!
Robert Herrick
What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?
Herman Melville
You'll come to learn a great deal if you study the Insignificant in depth
Odysseus Elytis
There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.
W.H. Auden
To me sometimes a mute sky is more expressive than the roaring sea
Munia Khan
The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.
T.S Eliot
Men are April when they woo December when they wed.
William Shakespeare
Vexed sailors curse the rain For which poor shepherds prayed in vain.
Edmund Waller
Indeed there's a woundy luck in names.
Ben Jonson
I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.
Hermann Hesse
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
John Keats
Tomorrow is the only future we have. Let’s live to love it!
Munia Khan
If we could learn to look instead of gawking,We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,If only we could act instead of talking,We wouldn't always end up on our arse.This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
Bertolt Brecht
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,when I come backwe will go out together,we will walk out together among,the ten thousand things,each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
Galway Kinnell
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
Sylvia Plath
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde
may my heart always be open to littlebirds who are the secrets of livingwhatever they sing is better than to knowand if men should not hear them men are oldmay my mind stroll about hungryand fearless and thirsty and suppleand even if it's sunday may i be wrongfor whenever men are right they are not youngand may myself do nothing usefullyand love yourself so more than trulythere's never been quite such a fool who could failpulling all the sky over him with one smile
E.E. Cummings
The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sail through the good days, and on bad days pick a spot of blue sky to steer toward.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Where there is no capacity to affirm another as a person in his own right there is no love. There is only masked fear.
Bonaro Overstreet
The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do something to love and something to hope for.
Joseph Addison
I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A double bed can seem awfully small if your'e sharing it with someone you don't love." -Misia ― Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
Chris Greenhalgh
And Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!
Thomas Campbell
It seems only easier when money is involved.
Anthony Liccione
To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.
Maya Angelou
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
Thomas Hardy
Character is perfectly educated will.
Novalis
Are you good men and true?
William Shakespeare
And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.
Dorothy Parker
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
Barbara Kingsolver
I will deny thee nothing: Whereon, I do beseech thee, grant me this, To leave me but a little to myself.
William Shakespeare
But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.
Isabel Huggan
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.(Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte)
Robert Southey
All knots that lovers tieAre tied to sever.Here shall your sweetheart lie,Untrue for ever.
A.E. Housman
No longer forward nor behind I look in hope or fear but grateful take the good I find the best of now and here.
John Greenleaf Whittier
One step, two steps, three steps; like winds of time experience joy of centuries, when movements become revelations of the dance of destinies.
Shah Asad Rizvi
To wander solitary there:Two paradises ‘twere in oneTo live in paradise alone.
Andrew Marvell
Wisdom might be conversion into a tree.
Manoel de Barros
The bats inebriate the sky . . .
A.E. Stallings
We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.
Suzy Kassem
I dream of defeating tyrants and ogres as well as circumstances and consequences that I cannot conquer in life. I dream of a love as sweet and addictive as chocolate-coated rose petals yet as tenacious as a thirsty vampire and as enduring as immortality. I dream of things improbable and boldly insane.
Richelle E. Goodrich