Quotes by Poets - Page 117

Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
Walt Whitman
The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.
Charles Bukowski
To learn new habits is everything for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Listen to me, attend me!And I will breathe into thee a soul,And thou shalt live for ever.
Ezra Pound
Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse
I'm not here to grant you the extraordinary love you never had for yourself. I'm here, on my own accord, to love you. So that when you stare into my mirror eyes, you may see how extraordinary you are.
Kamand Kojouri
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
Edgar Allan Poe
Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall.
Oliver Goldsmith
THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.
W.B. Yeats
Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.
Thomas Hardy
I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.
Kenneth Koch
She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age.
Dorothy Parker
We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.
Joseph Bottum
Death moved in the night, in search for blood, and when it found Life, it passed on by, like a cloud that moves by the face of the moon. When he found those dead without the red, he took the life before them born first, and the mourning emptied itself till the morning.
Anthony Liccione
Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.
Criss Jami
The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanised automaton.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is no cure for madness except the madness as the cure.
Santosh Kalwar
It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.
Charles Péguy
I don't know what's worse by number in America, the vacant houses standing, or the homeless people falling into them.
Anthony Liccione
Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness—and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.
Mary Oliver
The memory of the dead is indeed a good remorse. (Le souvenir des morts - Est bien un bon remords)
Charles de Leusse
Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty.
Gift Gugu Mona
Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
William Stafford
You may have learned from your mother or any other hunted woman. Smiling at devils is a useful learned thing. Swallowing discomfort down in spades. Holding it tight in your belly. Ageing on the inside only. Keeping it forever sexy.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.
Roman Payne
Out of every fruition of success no matter what comes forth something to make a new effort necessary.
Walt Whitman
Aviation in air, in water and in spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies.
César Vallejo
When you try to cast doubt on the relationship of two true lovers.You'll find a bond that you'll never discover
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Paul Verlaine
Though life has fated that we never cross paths again, don’t ever feel alone. For we are parallel …. and I will always be by your side.
Ranata Suzuki
Books are not distractions. Rather, they are, and have been, the most profound and accurate mirrors man has ever crafted.
RJ Arkhipov
I don't understand," says Gerald, alone in his third- class carriage, "how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time."And yet they do.
E Nesbit
He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won't find it out that way. He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that other have done for you.
Margaret Atwood
How much soul can include the self-salvation of sin?
Sorin Cerin
Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, full of unknowns, asking questions but raising possibilities.
Florian Armas
Some people complain there are too many people on earth, Some people complain about secret societies, Some people accuse others of not being able to wake up early. Almost all people complain about something.
Dejan Stojanovic
Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drank of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.
Arthur Rimbaud
Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
Herman Melville
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
OppressionNow dreamsAre not availableTo the dreamers,Nor songsTo the singers.In some landsDark nightAnd cold steelPrevail--But the dreamWill come back,And the songBreakIts jail.
Langston Hughes
Everything is language.
Octavio Paz
Ah but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
Margarita Engle
Pleasure and revenge have ears more deaf than adders to the voice of any true decision.
William Shakespeare
The heart fools the mind, where eyes went deaf to words, that fell on blinded ears to easy to fall in love.
Anthony Liccione
We say sound things when we do not strive to say to say extraordinary ones.
Comte de Lautréamont
Viola to Duke Orsino: 'I'll do my bestt t To woo your lady.'[Aside.] 'Yet, a barful strife!t t Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife.
William Shakespeare
(Priests) cheapjack merchants selling paradise
Jean Lorrain
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Diane Ackerman
You don't have to do something every day that scares you. There's no fun in being terrified. Do one thing every day that makes you happy.
Jodi Ann Bickley
Birds are the eyes of heaven, and flies are the spies of hell.
Suzy Kassem
Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. -Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)
Ani DiFranco
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The moon splits open.We move through, waterbirds risingto look for another lake.Or say we are living in a love-ocean,where trust works to caulk our body-boat,to make it last a little while,until the inevitable shipwreck,the total marriage, the death-union.Dissolve in friendship,like two drunkards fighting.Do not look for justice herein the jungle where your animal soulgives you bad advice.Drink enough wine so that you stop talking.You are a lover, and love is a tavernwhere no one makes much sense.Even if the things you say are poemsas dense as sacks of Solomon's gold,they become pointless.
Jalaluddin Rumi
We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night...
Andrea Gibson
Every family has one living patriarch or matriarch, the final arbiter and repository of ancient family history, and Nicole's Aunt Patti was the last woman standing.
Liz Rosenberg
There is a limit for everything. You can't just load tons and tons of peacock feathers in a cart considering it's light weight. If you do, it will damage the axle of the cart.
Thiruvalluvar
When sorrow's cup is filled up to the brim,the slightest touch of memory can cause tears to spill again.
John Mark Green
If we have not struggled/as hard as we can/at our strongest/how will we sense/the shape of our losses/or know what sustains/us longest or name/what change costs us,/saying how strange/it is that one sector/of the self can step in/for another in trouble,/how loss activates/a latent double, how/we can feed/as upon nectar/upon need?
Kay Ryan