Quotes by Poets - Page 33

We know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us that scarcely know how to read.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
When the heart stops oozing blood & the outpouring is clear as water (so to speak) then you know you've turned the corner & will be well.When you look inward & all pathwaysare no longer dark but clearly lighted& shine like transparent drinking strawsthen you know you'll find your way alone.When the gray morning has nothing to do with you & doesn't weigh you downlike a heavy blanket, then you knowthat moving will be easy again and your body will flow through timelike the river it really is, smooth & deep.no rocks, no shallows to smash or catch you,keep you from moving on.When the heart slowsto its normal rhythm and the beautyof birdsong at dawn doesn't make you cry because you are alone listening, then you know that everything has happened that is going to for now, and you can get on withyour life & everything about it that was yours alone and always finer thananyone could ever imagine it would bewithout him.
Grace Butcher
Light quirks of music broken and uneven make the soul dance upon a jig of heaven.
Alexander Pope
And she looked upon the mirror that was given as a gift. She hated everything about it, from the circular size of it, to the color, and the wooden frame that held it in place. But mostly, she hated looking at herself. Especially into this one that had a scratch on its glass surface, which would reflect back to her face. And as she looked, it would cut her as the words her father would often say, in telling her she was ugly.
Anthony Liccione
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Walking out with the people, I didn't know which was more exciting, the air race, the parachute jump that failed, or the cunt.
Charles Bukowski
If any has a stone to throw It is not I ever or now.
Elinor Wylie
As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I've seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans.
Linda Hogan
As long as I have other ideas and projects noted, I feel confident that they'll be alright until I get to them. And my ideas and tastes may have evolved by the time I get to them so that an idea can be discarded or expanded upon in ways that I wouldn't have thought of had I started on that project right away instead of finishing what I was currently on. It's good to give those ideas time to ripen and blossom.
Nicholas Trandahl
We are people-trees. Our roots are hidden in Earth .The branches spread out on Heavens.The fruits are our energy.Two different energies: The positive and negative ones.The balance of both carries the progress.Article by Author Katerina Kostaki :The Tree of Gnosis in the Garden of Eden
Katerina Kostaki
Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.
Thomas Hardy
I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
A useless life is an early death.
Johann von Goethe
We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service
We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too,But very human beings, human just as much as you.It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublimeWhen you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.
Alice Duer Miller
Mistakes are a fact of life: It is the response to the error that counts.
Nikki Giovanni
I prize the soul that slumbers in a quiet eye.
Eliza Cook
Turn around….you’ve got grass and dead flowers…”My fingers naturally began to comb through my long, black strands, shaking things loose as Sarti carefully removed more stubborn pieces. The flowers had been left over from my forced marriage to Thaddeus. The grass, from a sensual night with Kresh the eve of my honeymoon. Devilish irony.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
Margaret Atwood
There are people who are never content, never appeased, forever dissatisfied—who continually look to what escapes them, convincing themselves that if only they could attain that one desire outside of reach they would be happy.  It seems almost pointless to give to these people because their eyes immediately shift from the gift to stare miserably at the portion held back.  Their wants, demands, expectations, appetites are never satiated, thus they refuse to be happy.  And you cannot make them so.
Richelle E. Goodrich
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)
Mary Oliver
The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.
Aberjhani
[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions but there is always something left over mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.
Muriel Spark
So he caught her in his arms and kissed her, and they were very happy, and told each other what a beautiful world it was, and how wonderful it was that they should have found each other, seeing that the world is not only beautiful but rather large.
E Nesbit
Great sadnesses … they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
Rainer Maria Rilke
One sits down first one thinks afterwards.
Jean Cocteau
The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.
Edgar Allan Poe
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.
W.H. Auden
Everyone is folding boxes. Andrew is folding boxes. If the entire job were to fold boxes people would scream. They would fold, and sometimes scream, existentially, then be dragged into a field and beaten into a paste. Sometimes there would be a killing rampage.
Tao Lin
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm."How often already you've had to be told,Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.Dread fifty above more than fifty below."I have to be gone for a season or so.
Robert Frost
Later that night she picked the polish offwith her front teeth until the bed you sharedfor seven years seemed speckled with glitterand blood.
Warsan Shire
Alack, when once our grace we have forgot,Nothing goes right; we would and we would not.
William Shakespeare
Trippers and askers surround me,People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward andcity I live in, or the nation,The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors oldand new,My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or lossor lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,the fitful events;These come to me days and nights and go from me again,But they are not the Me myself.Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog withlinguists and contenders,I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
Walt Whitman
A coward is a servant of his fears.A hero enslaves his fears.
Lera Auerbach
What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He has achieved success who has lived well laughed often and loved much who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children.
Bessie A. Stanley
Death changes nothing but the masks that cover our faces.
Kahlil Gibran
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting outof love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as ashort cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
Thomas Hardy
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Hermann Hesse
The night is still waiting.
Dejan Stojanovic
... (lady i willtouch you with my mind.) Touchyou, that is all/lightly and you utterly will becomewith infinite care/ the poem which i do not write.
E.E. Cummings
As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was acontribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.
Robert Conquest
In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.
Rabindranath Tagore
Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.
W.B. Yeats
Tis time to die, when 'tis a shame to live.
Thomas Middleton
Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?
Dorothy Parker
Free me as free is the forest fire, as is the thunder that laughs aloud and hurls defiance to darkness.
Rabindranath Tagore
there are so many dayswhen living stops and pulls up and sitsand waits like a train on the rails.
Charles Bukowski
It's fallacious reasoning for the atheist to hate all religion due to men who manipulate religion to fit their own agendas. They are counterparts, therefore, if Truth is true, partners in crime. To believers, the atheist and the religiously corrupt boil down to the same person, the self-righteous: one denies Truth to fit his own agenda; the other manipulates Truth to fit his own agenda.
Criss Jami
JESUS Woke up in a white veilThe fog sets the silence in my handsI think back to my thoughtsAbout the peopleI'm thinkingWith increasing pain in my headPeople who have condemned meDark hourinthe hoursAnd I would now complain quietlyBut there is no furyAnd there is no sadnessThe time has melted away like water in the seaTearsofthe womenThey are covered with cloudsLet my heart bleed to deathAmong the thornsatlastThere is no sun in the zenith
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.
Dorothy Parker
Love is a chemical reaction, but it cannot be fully understood or defined by science. And though a body cannot exist without a soul, it too cannot be fully understood or defined by science.Love is the most powerful form of energy, but science cannot decipher its elements. Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love, but even the most advanced physician cannot prescribe it as medicine.
Suzy Kassem
There are as many ways of loving as there are people, and that wildflower variety is the great beauty of this dimension of existence.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Some Me of BeautyI took a good long look at myself in a full length mirrorSometimes it’s good to look in a full length mirrorAnd what I saw was not some soul sister poetess of the momentBut I saw just a womanJust a woman feelingJust a woman humanAnd what I felt wasWhat I felt was a spiritual revelationAnd what I felt was a root revival of some love coming onComing on strongAnd I knew then, looking in a full length mirror,That many things were overAnd some me of beauty was about to begin
Carolyn Rodgers
Father calls me William sister calls me Will Mother calls me Willie but the fellows call me Bill!
Eugene Field
I do what I do because I love God, as I love your children, as I love humanity, as I love peace, truth, and justice for all. I may not be a fan of religion, but I am a big fan of God. I choose not to subscribe to any one religion because I recognize truths in them all — both the truths and flaws. For anybody to believe that any father would want to see his children fighting is madness. It does not make the Creator happy to see anybody massacre any of his beautiful creations. If you must know the religion I choose, I choose LOVE. If you must know the name of my god, his name is Truth, or rather 'He Who is One, The One Who is All.
Suzy Kassem
give me the worldbut for Christ's sake,do not sugercoat it.give me it rawand gleaming withtruth.i want the madnessto twirl me around untili can no longer stand.i refuse to be drunkon a soft world.the world is cruel,my love,you must understandthat,but in that understandingyou must understand this,too, just because it is crueldoes not mean it is notbeautiful.
Christopher Poindexter
So our virtuesLie in the interpretation of the time:And power, unto itself most commendable,Hath not a tomb so evident as a chairTo extol what it hath done.One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
William Shakespeare