Quotes by Poets - Page 285

It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

Silence is the best language to speak in when you have lots of things to say.

If Springtime crawls out of thewild mouths of flowers, thensurely, Winter crawls out of mine.

But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

Like the weather or bonds between lovers,transformations can never be predicted.All energy transmutes one day or another,in one way or another. Either in its form or composition. Or in its position or disposition.

I grasp words for the sake of clutching My mind considers them heart touchingRight then I write for my reader's pleasureNot knowing what distance a soul can measure

And while throughout the self same motion Repeated on forever flows The thousandfold o er arching ocean Its strong embrace around all throws Streams through all things the joy of living The least star thrilleth fond accord And all their crowding all their striving Is endless rest in God the Lord. - - -GER:Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbeSich wiederholend ewig fließt,Das tausendfältige GewölbeSich kräftig ineinander schließt,Strömt Lebenslust aus allen Dingen,Dem kleinsten wie dem größten SternUnd alles Drängen, alles RingenIst ewige Ruh in Gott dem Herrn.Zahme Xenien VI.

Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.

BLOODY LIPSThe bloody woundOf the gladiatorGurgles out life's end.The cries of acclimations from the standsFill the sky with raging tigers.Waving their arms about to incite the massesThe aging notables add an air of dignity to the arena.Making their separate entriestheyKNEELover the still-warm corpsesOf the young. Their withered lips they poseUpon the fresh flowing woundsAnd, to prolong their lives – so they believe,Suck, ravenously suck out the blood, blood, blood.Fresh blood from the sunFlowing into filthy veinsAs into sewage pipes,And thus the Heart of the Nation is abandoned.

The worst thing in life is having parents that always stand against you and never with you. They discourage you, instill fear in you, hold you back, push you down and never encourage you to fly forward. When I have kids, they'll already be born with propellers with added wings. Even if one tells me they want to go learn how to ride lions in Africa, if their heart is driving that desire, I'd say "DO IT".If we throw blankets over our children's dreams, we darken their world and extinguish their desire to live. I'd rather my kid die with a wild fire in his/her heart than with a malfunctioning or drained out fuse. Always allow your kids to keep humming with dreams and ideas that fuel their passions. Never tell them something is impossible. If you have a really strong determined kid, they'll go out there killing themselves trying to do the unachievable just to prove you wrong. And if you have a weak kid, they'll give up on life and settle for bagging Cokes and potato chips at your local grocery store.

I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.

Avoid fear because it will blind you from seeing God’s purpose about your life and limit your potential.

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Think of your woods and orchards without birds!Of empty nests that cling to boughs and beamsAs in an idiot's brain remembered wordsHang empty 'mid the cobwebs of his dreams!

Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.

I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.

i dream nights and girls like tigers,claws and teeth on both.

Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.

You are not for the left or right team, but for what is right against the wrong.

Always ask yourself: "What will happen if I say nothing?

Whenever you feel like feeling like a devil's advocate, Bible-thump. That, in a worldly world, is the great irony and satire of evangelism.

Ocean separates lands, not souls..

Age cannot wither her nor custom stale Her infinite variety.

Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again.

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

I had everything summed up in a nutshell unfortunately I lost the nut.

If we ask the right questions, we can change the world with the right answers.

Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth.

The maddened four men followed frantically, for it is better to be in the presence of the awful than only within hearing. ("The Black Dog")

I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.

We love in others what we lack ourselves and would be everything but what we are.

Colonialism is the mother of terrorism.

Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.

The prince of darkness is a gentleman.

Oh death you can wait keep your distance.

[J]ust the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men – and learned men among them – have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour. Not only one or two ... but, more generally, from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators – it would take too long to mention their names – it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts, hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true. To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realise how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behaviour and character of women.

The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your misery? Their tears are real, but they are not for you.

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships...

Sometimes a crumb fallsFrom the tables of joy, Sometimes a boneIs flung.To some peopleLove is given, To othersOnly heaven.

The joy of the young is to disobey - but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

The weakness of one man is the strength of another, hence we all are different for a reason.

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.

Despite its dark veins, the transparency of dragonfly’s wings assures me of a pure, innocent world

The Road Not TakenTwo roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothtAnd be one traveler, long I stoodtAnd looked down one as far as I couldtTo where it bent in the undergrowth;t Then took the other, as just as fair,tAnd having perhaps the better claim,tBecause it was grassy and wanted wear;tThough as for that the passing theretHad worn them really about the same,t And both that morning equally laytIn leaves no step had trodden black.tOh, I kept the first for another day!tYet knowing how way leads on to way,tI doubted if I should ever come back.t I shall be telling this with a sightSomewhere ages and ages hence:tTwo roads diverged in a wood, and I—tI took the one less traveled by,tAnd that has made all the difference.

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

September tried to show her sternness. It was becoming a habit. She could show her sternness and think about this another time, when it was quiet and no new red Moon turned somersaults in the sky. But when she reached for her sternness, all September found in her heart was the bar of a trapeze, swinging wild, inviting her to catch it....She leaned up and kissed her Marid and hoped it was the right thing. Her heart caught the bar and swung out, swung wild, over the lights and the gasps below, reaching for a pair of sure blue hands in the air and willing them to find hers.

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose......Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Do not become someone else just because you are hurt. Be who you are & smile, it may solve, all problems you have got.

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.

They had been talking about astrology, a forbidden science that was not pursued in the cloister. Narcissus had said that astrology was an attempt to arrange and order the many different types of human beings according to their natures and destinies. At this point Goldmund had objected: "You're forever talking of differences - I've finally recognised a pet theory of yours. When you speak of the great difference that is supposed to exist between you and me, for instance, it seems to me that this difference is nothing but your strange determination to establish differences."Narcissus: "Yes. You've hit the nail on the head. That's it: to you, differences are quite unimportant; to me, they are what matters most. I am a scholar by nature; science is my vocation. And science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.' Its essence couldn't be defined more accurately. For us, the men of science, nothing is as important as the establishment of differences; science is the art of differentiation. Discovering in every man that which distinguishes him from others is to know him.

Look too on this poor planet of ours,Torn by the storms of mysterious powers,Evil contending with good from its birth,Wrenching in battle the heartstrings of earth,—Ah! what infinities circle us here,Strangeness and wonderment swathing the sphere!

Every day I give you my heart. At the end of the year, there are hundreds of hearts, which I will give to you. Heart to heart only for you, and even more hearts - in a heartless time.

That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.