Quotes by Poets - Page 232

You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may tread me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wellsPumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,With the certainty of tides,Just like hopes springing high,Still I'll rise.Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries.Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard'Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise.Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shameI riseUp from a past that's rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that's wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.
Maya Angelou
Too many kings can ruin an army
Homer
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Anne Sexton
Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.
Edgar Allan Poe
Your memory feels like home to me.So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.
Ranata Suzuki
Endure and preserve yourselves for better things.
Virgil
Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.
William Shakespeare
Difficulties are meant to rouse not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
William Ellery Channing
Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.
Johann Gottfried Herder
Man's real life is happy chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe
It is in the coldest months that hugs linger snug, and they warm the soul the most.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Steer your boat with justice: forge A tongue on truth's anvil.
Pindar
When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand- she's as good as any other; they'll be all alike in the groundwork; 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.
Thomas Hardy
Still enveloped in a blanket of dreams he (life) continued to lie still, pretended as if he was in a deep slumber.
Suman Pokhrel
When true love broke my heart in half,I took the whiskey from the shelf,And told my neighbors when to laugh.I keep a dog, and bark myself.
Theodore Roethke
Segregation shaped me education liberated me.
Maya Angelou
The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.
Walter Savage Landor
If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.
Roberto Bolaño
Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.
Margaret Atwood
My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.
Dejan Stojanovic
Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.
Aberjhani
‎Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.
Patrick Lane
Comedy to me has always seemed a social tightrope for the comedian. For all axioms intellectually sound the general public would prefer to be amused, but in those emotionally sound, it then chooses to get offended.
Criss Jami
Love by the sweat of thy brow.Not through whispered words of hollow sound or lofty dreams ne’er substance bound that more than oft do run aground. Nay, love with mighty, blistered hands that turn the soil and carve the land. A bearer of toil and golden band. Be strong! A founder of the feast! Protective knight who slays the beast! For promises and vows aloud are naught but wispy veneer shroud like cobwebs, frail, the airy words and wooing fail. So work, my darling. Toil as proof. Thy loyal heart be drained of youth and yet beat on, incessant sound. Both feet take root within the ground, and service be thy kingly crown.Love by the sweat of thy brow.
Richelle E. Goodrich
For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face.
Dejan Stojanovic
The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
In the perfect Capitalist State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement.
Hilaire Belloc
something about the phrase - something abouthow i have to be unlike the womeni call sisters in order to be wantedmakes me want to spit your tongue out
Rupi Kaur
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Taste is the feminine of genius.
Edward FitzGerald
Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis.(Whatever advice you give, be brief.)
Horace
Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
T.S Eliot
Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.
Adam Zagajewski
How will people remember you when you are gone? And for how long until they forget? Were you selfish or selfless? A gossip or a patient listener? Did you add value to the world, or did you simply take from it? Did you add value to the lives of others, or did you take the value out of someone's life? Were you a plus or negative? Meaningful or meaningless? Do you live to take or live to give?
Suzy Kassem
If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.
Kathleen Rooney
Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
Erica Jong
Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.
Caryll Houselander
I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not my wrath did grow.
William Blake
I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
Franz Grillparzer
How did I get to be a grown-up? At times, I find myself still sitting on the hillside, plotting revenge against the adult world.
Erica Jong
What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.
David Malouf
I choose to love you in silence, for in silence I find no rejection.I choose to love you in loneliness, for in loneliness no one owns you but me.I choose to adore you from a distance, for distance will shield me from pain.I chose to kiss you in the wind, for the wind is gentler than my lips.I choose to hold you in my dreams, for in my dreams you have no end.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,Though you are the sister of the river willows,I will kill you with my singing,Without spilling your blood on the ground.Not touching you with my hand,Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,But with your unimaginable groansI will finally slake my thirst.From her, who wandered the earth before me,Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,From her, who still exists in the ether—From her you will set me free.
Anna Akhmatova
You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Mary Oliver
To seek truth requires one to ask the right questions. Those void of truth never ask about anything because their ego and arrogance prevent them from doing so. Therefore, they will always remain ignorant. Those on the right path to Truth are extremely heart-driven and childlike in their quest, always asking questions, always wanting to understand and know everything — and are not afraid to admit they don't know something. However, every truth seeker does need to breakdown their ego first to see Truth. If the mind is in the way, the heart won't see anything.
Suzy Kassem
My thatched hut; the whole sky Is its roof The mountains are its hedge, And it has the sea for a garden. I’m inside with nothing at all, Not even a bag, And yet there are visitors who say “It’s hidden behind a bamboo door” — tMuso Soseki
Musō Soseki
Youth must triumph... now. Afterwards, it will be life.
Jose Garcia Villa
We've become a nation of wolves, ruled by sheep.Owned by swine, overfed, and put to sleep.While the media elite declare what to think,I'll be wide awake, on the edge, and on the brink.
Otep Shamaya
Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give I give myself.
Walt Whitman
Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
Kahlil Gibran
I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.
Ha Jin
This is the role of the mother. And in that visit I really saw clearly, for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and also cuddles... but because in an interesting and and maybe an eerie and other worldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.
Maya Angelou
I have one head that wants to be good,And one that wants to be bad.And always, as soon as I get up,One of my heads is sad.
John Ciardi
Kindness is a girl's best friend.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Dark night lay on my eyes, like a veil of black cloves - dust on my feet, at the beginning of the path of knowledge.Tracer from an invisible hand, a rainbow, fell in my thoughts - I encountered the truth; and truth shall be my light until the end of days.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.
T.S Eliot
In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,
Mary Ruefle
I heard the breeze whisper your name to the trees. And the flowers giggled smiling at the leaves. I and my loneliness keep talking about you.
Avijeet Das
At work, or anywhere in life, people should be a team, working for the best of all, not protecting individual egos.
Jay Woodman