Quotes by Poets - Page 251

If the feet of enlightenment moved, the great ocean would overflow; If that head bowed, it would look down upon the heavens.Such a body has no place to rest. . . .Let another continue this poem.
Paul Reps
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,and whose shepherds mislead them.Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.Pity the nation that raises not its voice,except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as heroand aims to rule the world with force and by torture.Pity the nation that knows no other language but its ownand no other culture but its own.Pity the nation whose breath is moneyand sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erodeand their freedoms to be washed away.My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Literature endures like the universal spirit,And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men.
Li Shang-yin
Nobody knows you.You don't know yourself.And I, who am half in love with you,What am I in love with?My own imaginings?
D.H. Lawrence
I’m alone with the ghost of the swamp, somewhere near the weeping willows.
Steven Herrick
I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. Icertainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have laindown together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked fleshthe colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Haveyou seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye againstyour collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a treeand climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? Youkept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed forme, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slowword, you can’t rush it...
Michael Ondaatje
Your edict, King, was strong,But all your strength is weakness itself againstThe immortal unrecorded laws of God.They are not merely now: they were, and shall be,Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.I knew I must die, even without your decree:I am only mortal. And if I must dieNow, before it is my time to die,Surely this is no hardship: can anyoneLiving, as I live, with evil all about me,Think Death less than a friend?
Sophocles
His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While he mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He freely used his good ideas in conversation, and in letters; and they were straightway wrought into the texture of other men's books, and so lost to him for ever.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
George Santayana
Vivas to those who have fail’d!And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!And to those themselves who sank in the sea!And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
Walt Whitman
Making night hideous.
William Shakespeare
Money makes a monster of a man, that makes money his master.
Anthony Liccione
In an age of bombsguzzling blood, skylarks merge peacewith thought and action.
Aberjhani
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.
Margaret Atwood
Hold fast to dreamsfor if dreams dielife is a broken-winged birdthat can not fly.Hold fast to dreamsfor when dreams golife is a barren fieldfrozen with snow.
Langston Hughes
Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Hermann Hesse
If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
My freshness is spending its wavering shower in the dust.
Francis Thompson
O take me from the busy crowd,I cannot bear the noise!For Nature's voice is never loud;I seek for quiet joys.The book I love is everywhere,And not in idle words;The book I love is known to all,And better lore affords.
John Clare
It's all right to hold a conversation, but you should let go of it now and then.
Richard Armour
Days may pass into months, months may pass into years, and years may pass into decades, but I will always keep waiting for you.
Avijeet Das
The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.
Michel Houellebecq
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!
William Shakespeare
They sicken of calm who know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.
John Dryden
He was a poet -oh all men are when they're in love.
Eric Gamalinda
Mother, what is a Feminist?""A feminist, my daughter,Is any woman now who caresTo think about her own affairsAs men don't think she oughter.
Alice Duer Miller
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,Rough-hew them how we will
William Shakespeare
I've found that one of the most important things in life is to learn how to forgive yourself.
Sai Marie Johnson
Advice"I must do as you do? Your way I ownIs a very good way, and still,There are sometimes two straight roads to a town,One over, one under the hill.You are treading the safe and the well-worn way,That the prudent choose each time;And you think me reckless and rash to-dayBecause I prefer to climb.Your path is the right one, and so is mine.We are not like peas in a pod,Compelled to lie in a certain line,Or else be scattered abroad.'T were a dull old world, methinks, my friend,If we all just went one way;Yet our paths will meet no doubt at the end,Though they lead apart today.You like the shade, and I like the sun;You like an even pace,I like to mix with the crowd and run,And then rest after the race.I like danger, and storm, and strife,You like a peaceful time;I like the passion and surge of life,You like its gentle rhyme.You like buttercups, dewy sweet,And crocuses, framed in snow;I like roses, born of the heat,And the red carnation's glow.I must live my life, not yours, my friend,For so it was written down;We must follow our given paths to the end,But I trust we shall meet--in town.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.
Andrei Voznesensky
O, that this too too solid flesh would meltThaw and resolve itself into a dew!Or that the Everlasting had not fix'dHis canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,Seem to me all the uses of this world!Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,That grows to seed; things rank and gross in naturePossess it merely. That it should come to this!But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:So excellent a king; that was, to this,Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my motherThat he might not beteem the winds of heavenVisit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,As if increase of appetite had grownBy what it fed on: and yet, within a month--Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--A little month, or ere those shoes were oldWith which she follow'd my poor father's body,Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,My father's brother, but no more like my fatherThan I to Hercules: within a month:Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tearsHad left the flushing in her galled eyes,She married. O, most wicked speed, to postWith such dexterity to incestuous sheets!It is not nor it cannot come to good:But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.
William Shakespeare
the idea that we are so capable of love but still choose to be toxic
Rupi Kaur
Poetry is seeing everything when there is only one thing. It is looking at a rose but seeing the stars, moons, seas, and trees. It is a truth beyond logic, an experience beyond thought. Poetry is the Earth pausing on its axis in order to manifest itself as a rose.
Kamand Kojouri
Summer is the worst time of all to be alone. The earth is warm and lovely, free to go about in; and always somewhere in the distance there is a place where two people might be happy if only they were together. It is in the spring that one dreams of such places; one thinks of the summer which is coming, and the heart dreams of its friend.
Robert Nathan
To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer.
Sa'di
A life of devotion to one's passion gives us meaning to our life.
Avijeet Das
Become my muse. And let me paint you with my words...
Avijeet Das
I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm cuz I'd rather be left for dead than wondering what thunder sounds like.
Andrea Gibson
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
François Mauriac
Silence is the herald of joy
William Shakespeare
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
George Meredith
AdiosHer pretty picturelying on theground was likethe topplingof somefascistregimeAnd burningthe photograph,was thecelebration
Phil Volatile
A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.
Wisława Szymborska
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
D.H. Lawrence
Patience isn't tested when it is self-imposed and the duration is self-regulated. Patience is hardly tested when the outcome means little to you. However, when circumstances beyond your control force you to wait with baited breath knowing the outcome will affect your life substantially, that is the true test of patience. It is a cage inside a burning building where every exit is blocked by angels calmly advising you to wait a moment longer. Your choice is to either trust their words or madly claw through them.
Richelle E. Goodrich
In all my wanderings through this world of care,In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;To husband out life's taper at the close,And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,I still had hopes, my long vexations past,Here to return -- and die at home at last.
Oliver Goldsmith
Greatness is in influence, and not necessarily in affluence. It is not achieved by being a 'paper millionaire', but by being a 'people millionaire'.
Ogwo David Emenike
I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems
Philip Larkin
When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.
Kahlil Gibran
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
Jean Genet
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
W.H. Auden
I’m looking for youin the bare corridor where my shadow is the only passerbyharmonizing an unsettling whisper: echoed through my chiming thoughtsFrom the poem 'Looking For You
Munia Khan
We hunger after the sweet nectar of happiness without understanding that it is harvested from the flowering field of good deeds.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The idea that people who guarded you could also be the people that you needed guarding from was nothing anyone should have to learn.
Tiphanie Yanique
For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.
Amy Lowell
Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance and not breath.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Poetry helps heal wounds.Makes them tangible.At the poetry reading I reada poem.A prophecy I wrote down. Almost couldn't go through with it.But it came outhurried and hotand by the endmy tongue was on fire.
Isabel Quintero
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It does not matter what religion you are, so long as your conscience guides your words and actions. We are all reflections of God means we are all reflections of his image — which is LIGHT. There is only one God and that is the cosmic heart of the universe — whatever you choose to call him or her. The heart within us is what connects us to God (the heart of the universe). This super basic concept is preached in all religions. God is TRUTH and LIGHT, and only through your conscience do you connect to him. Any person who does not use their conscience is very disconnected from God. Because again, the language of light can only be decoded by the heart.
Suzy Kassem