Quotes by Poets - Page 278

The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.
William Shakespeare
For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I believein love at first sightbut I will always believe that the peoplewe lovewe have loved before.Many, many, many times beforeand when we stumblethrough grace and circumstance and that brilliant illusion of choiceto finally meet them again, we feel it fastereach time through.The one glance that set life alightis two sets of two eyesstaring through the layersof lifetimes and stolen glancesand first kisses and hands held;the brace against the weight and unrelenting tideof waiting.I believein love at first sightbut am not burdened with the misconceptionthat it's a first sightat all.
Tyler Knott Gregson
Why should I have been surprised?Hunters walk the forestwithout a sound.The hunter, strapped to his rifle,the fox on his feet of silk,the serpent on his empire of muscles—all move in a stillness,hungry, careful, intent.Just as the cancerentered the forest of my body,without a sound.
Mary Oliver
all those nights with the phone warming the side of my face like the sun.
Warsan Shire
And what will bow your shoulders downwill be the vicious and worthless company with whom you will fall into this abyss.
Dante Alighieri
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
Sir Walter Scott
I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film
Erin Belieu
Wedded she some years, and to a manOf fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE'Twere better to have TWO of five and twenty...
George Gordon Byron
Little tube of mighty pow'r Charmer of an idle hour Object of my warm desire.
Isaac Hawkins Browne
Men crawl in slime and wallow in the mud;The Realist groans: "All life is mud ans slime!"Men lie and steal and shed each other's blood;And Realism sees but blood and crime.Yet Right is just as real as Wrong,The mountain peak is real as the ooze,A curse is no more real than a song;Among realities we need but choose.The cynic sees the failure of To-day,The Prophet cries the triumph of To-morrow,Knowing the spirit in our clogging clayThat masters doubt, disaster, loss and sorrow.Failure is but a passing weariness,There is no final answer but Success.
Berton Braley
She wildly burned for the one she loved and he stood there watching, hoping he too would catch a blaze from the violence stirring in her heart.
Robert M. Drake
The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation
John Ashbery
That in the captain's but a choleric word,Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.
William Shakespeare
There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go.
Margaret Atwood
Make haste to Love.
Hadewijch
Shoot if you must this old gray head But spare your country's flag she said.
John Greenleaf Whittier
I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
Sylvia Plath
It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo.
John Collings Squire
A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying
Margaret Atwood
Luck is the bastard child of Fate and Destiny.
Carroll Bryant
In life we all should learn to forgive but never forget. Best way to learn from our mistakes.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple.
Dejan Stojanovic
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When a mother gives birth, her body is not only able to provide nourishment to her baby, but is also designed to be its own personal medicine cabinet. Breast milk is the best and most natural food you can give a child, and applying it sparingly on a baby's head, eye or skin will eliminate cradle cap, acne, rashes, dryness, and even eye infections.
Suzy Kassem
Choose altruism, because selfishism is a lonely, cold, dark hole.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed.
Alfred Tennyson
What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death. I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.
Jeremy Reed
Prayer is like coffee for my soul in the morning
Munia Khan
I think there is a choice possible to us at any moment as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser
The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.
Criss Jami
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Explore many facets of the written word.
Kamla K Kapur
The calm skies that drifted above us lulled us into thinking this traversée would be smooth, but after several hours, the unsteady sea had taken its toll on me and after a light lunch and a brief swim in the open sea failed to do so, I attempted to remedy my mal de mer with rest. When I awoke, the sun had already set and the cool air and soft light of twilight helped recalibrate my disoriented thoughts. Although my seasickness had subsided, I lay starboard side facing the heavens - that were now a deep shade of purple - so as to not provoke another episode. We set to anchoring behind several large volcanic pillars just a stone’s-throw away from where the Tyrrhenian Sea kissed the east of the island. A handful of wishes scattered the skies as we approached the shores of Aci Trezza. As these stars traced their dying song across the void above, part of me felt ashamed for even entertaining the notion of wishing upon a star, but that voice was speedily silenced by words He had once shared with me in Scotland: “There is always some truth to fiction.
RJ Arkhipov
The world's history is constant like the laws of nature and simple like the souls of men.
J. C. F. von Schiller
If one is content to freely speak trash about another, it is probably more correct to judge them as the one of ill repute and refuse the load of garbage they offer you.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Integrity is the best attire to put on because the without integrity one cannot conceal his nakedness.
Gugu Mona
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
Margaret Atwood
We dream and fight with demons real and imagined.
Dejan Stojanovic
Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!
Thomas Hardy
History will be erased in the universal purgatory.
Dejan Stojanovic
Better farPursue a frivolous trade by serious means,Than a sublime art frivolously.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
Barbara Kingsolver
My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.
Wanda Lea Brayton
All things change nothing is extinguished.
Ovid
Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.
Álvaro de Campos
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn.
Rainer Maria Rilke
An Arundel TombSide by side, their faces blurred,The earl and countess lie in stone,Their proper habits vaguely shownAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,And that faint hint of the absurd -The little dogs under their feet.Such plainness of the pre-BaroqueHardly involves the eye, untilIt meets his left-hand gauntlett, stillClasped empty in the other, andOne sees with a sharp tender shockHis hand withdrawn, holding her hand.They would not think to lie so long,Such faithfulness in effigyWas just a detail friends would see,A sculptor's sweet commissioned graceThrown off in helping to prolongThe Latin names around the base.They would not guess how early inTheir supine stationary voyageThe air would change to soundless damage,Turn the old tenantry away;How soon succeeding eyes beingTo look, not read. Rigidly, theyPersisted, linked, through lengths and breadthsOf time. Snow fell, undated. LightEach summer thronged the grass. A brightLitter of birdcalls strewed the sameBone-littered ground. And up the pathsThe endless altered people cameWashing at their identity.Now helpless in the hollowOf an unarmorial age, a troughOf smoke in slow suspended skeinsAbove their scrap of history,Only an attitude remains.Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon and to proveOur almost-instinct almost-true:What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.
Edgar Allan Poe
Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.
Aberjhani
Our entire life worth's less than one moment of the absolute's truth vanity.
Sorin Cerin
To throw away an honest friend is as it were to throw your life away.
Sophocles
Poetry is the sound of the human animal.
Suniti Namjoshi
If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.
Criss Jami
Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.
Aberjhani
Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Jean Racine
Without pleasure there is no sight or measure.
Dejan Stojanovic
I didn't know how to hold my lips.
Lesle Lewis
That everything you want to happen, will happen, if you decide you want it enough. That every time you think a sad thought, you can think a happy one instead.That you control that completely.That the people who make you laugh are more beautiful than beautiful people. That you laugh more than you cry. That crying is good for you. That the people you hate wish you would stop and you do too.That your friends are reflections of the best parts of you. That you are more than the sum total of the things you know and how you react to them. That dancing is sometimes more important than listening to the music.That the most embarrassing, awkward moments of your life are only remembered by you and no one else
Iain S. Thomas