Quotes by Poets - Page 272

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself.
Hermann Hesse
Embrace contradictions for they make upall of life:You will eternally be looking for yourself andseeking ways to lose yourself.
Kamand Kojouri
If Cupid misses the heart, he touches the body fatally. (Si Cupidon rate le cœur, - Il touche mortellement le corps)
Charles de Leusse
for a man of 55 who didn't get laid until he was 23 and not very often until he was 50 I think that I should stay listed via Pacific Telephone until I get as much as the average man has had
Charles Bukowski
On the Gallows OnceKofi AwoonorI crossed quite a fewof your rivers, my gods,into this plain where thirst reignsI heard the cry of mournersthe long cooing of the African wren at duskthe laughter of the children at dawnhad long ceasednight comes fast in our landwhere indeed are the promised vistasthe open fields, blue skies, the singing birdsand abiding love?History records actsof heroism, barbarismof some who had powerand abused it massivelyof some whose progenitorsplanned for themthe secure state of madnessfrom which no storm can shake them;of some who took the last shipsdisembarked on some far-off shores and forgotof some who simply laid down the loadand went home to the ancestors
Kofi Awoonor
For you she learned to wear a short black slipand red lipstick,how to order a glass of red wineand finish it. She learned to reach outas if to touch your arm and then nottouch it, changing the subject.she'd begin, orTo call your best friendsby their schoolboy namesand give them kisses good-bye,to look away when they say! So your confidence grows.She doesn't ask what you wantbecause she knows.Isn't that what you think?When actually she was only waitingto be stunned, and then do this,never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:in one motion up, over, and gone,the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,her face flashing away from you in the fabricso that you couldn't say if she wasappearing or disappearing.
Deborah Garrison
Not knowing the name of the tree,I stood in the floodof its sweet scent.
Bashō Matsuo
Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.
Robert Creeley
To dream! Such dreams certainly make life more worth living... and only dreams can do that for me.
Jean Lorrain
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
May our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.
Scott Cairns
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
Margaret Atwood
I have a great book. It’s called Stantasyland. Except I don’t have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Twitter is a serious writing distraction. As are grapefruits. The two have nothing else in common.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I am superior to you only in one point: I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.
Hermann Hesse
The happiest adults are those who never buried old toys or abandoned imaginary friends.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The wit taught by God to the beeIs withheld from the lion and the wild ass.
Jalaluddin Rumi
The smiles of ancient soulsThat bless this,Our space to live and learnAnd urge us on to shine again…
Scott Hastie
Clearly, naming the major figures in the tradition had become a tradition in itself.
Gregory Woods
When you love you should not think you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Kahlil Gibran
There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by.
George Meredith
Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty, and a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body.
Aberjhani
After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Love is to feel your breath.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Alack, there lies more peril in thine eyeThan twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet,And I am proof against their enmity.
William Shakespeare
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Love will never let you down, if you don't give it up
Benny Bellamacina
To be happy, you have to risk being unhappy.
Ogwo David Emenike
All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.
Hermann Hesse
I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and that whatever it was might just be written on his face.But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium gray dots.The inky black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.
Sylvia Plath
I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
Michael Ondaatje
You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing.
E.E. Cummings
Alone"From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—
Edger Allen Poe
...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
Anne Michaels
Your gracefulness and feminine charms always so tender, you make my heart smile and wonder!
Avijeet Das
He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
Margaret Atwood
Losing will not always amount to a loss, sometimes you have to lose those toxic relationships and bad habits to create a space for better things.
Gugu Mona
I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The ball and chain of creativity has no key
Benny Bellamacina
The one who sees thought as a thought is the witness to mind and no longer subject to suffering.
Vivian Amis
With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller
Could there ever be a wise man without the wisdom or life or without the death of illusion?
Sorin Cerin
Lunar Eclipse doesn't that sound like a car you can only drive at night?
Stanley Victor Paskavich
He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look.
Herta Müller
In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
Kenneth Boulding
We should not fail to hide our love for the one who fails to hide hatred
Munia Khan
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries Path.' Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of God, who are you?' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.' She woke her husband and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he. ("Village Ghosts")
W.B. Yeats
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Ezra Pound
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
To climb steep hills Requires slow pace at first.
William Shakespeare
America, the plum blossoms are falling.
Allen Ginsberg
A source of innocent merriment! Of innocent merriment.
W.S. Gilbert
In the big scheme of things, a little love is all we need
Benny Bellamacina
When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.
Roman Payne
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Robert Louis Stevenson
What does life give me in the end but sorrow?What do love's good and evil send but sorrow?I've only seen one true companion - pain,And I have known no faithful friend but sorrow.
Hafez
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
Christian Wiman
My look, mind you, is not chocolate like Lauryn Hill, Whoopi Goldberg, or Naomi Campbell - it is pitch black and shimmering like the purple outer space of the universe. I am the charcoal that creates diamonds. I am the blackest black woman (41).
Kola Boof
When faced with trials, pray so that you cannot be the trial yourself.
Gift Gugu Mona
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.
Boris Pasternak