Quotes by Poets - Page 334

Good governance is about nothing more or less than creating happiness. It really is that simple.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
All I have is a voice.
W.H. Auden
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
May Sarton
My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.
Richelle E. Goodrich
A too closely watched flower/blossoms the wrong color./Excess attention to the jonquil/turns it gentian. Flowers/need it tranquil to get/their hues right. Some/only open at midnight.
Kay Ryan
What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
Susan Griffin
We're all made the same but then born to change. Which then don't make us the same.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
Sylvia Plath
Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.
Rainer Maria Rilke
better the crime,the suicides of lovers, the incest committedby brother and sister like two mirrorsin love with their likeness, better to eatthe poisoned bread, adultery on a bedof ashes, ferocious love, the poisonousvines of delirium, the sodomite who wearsa gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,better to be stoned in the plaza than to turnthe mill that squeezes out the juice of life,that turns eternity into empty hours,minutes into prisons, and time intocopper coins and abstract shit
Octavio Paz
The one kiss that was stolen, was given in a lie.
Anthony Liccione
Dying is a universe of its own. 
Arlene Ang
I love youMy life stretched over a bridgeI need youMy life stretched over you
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
It takes two of us to discover truth: one to utter it and one to understand it.
Kahlil Gibran
Any time gone by was better.
Jorge Manrique
Pray for others because others are selflessly praying for you as well.
Gift Gugu Mona
Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion, or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain?
Andrea Gibson
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.
Boris Pasternak
Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
Margaret Atwood
Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.
Charles Simic
Fear leads to death as the window to the courtyard. Jump!
Grigoris Deoudis
The pathway traced with blood and tears,and dust of all our father's dead,Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,Fade to the mist of nameless years.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
George Sterling
Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.
Allen Ginsberg
Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!
Charles Baudelaire
Dust into dust and under dust to lie Sans wine sans song sans singer and - sans end.
Omar Khayyám
Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--Though some savants make earth include the sky;And blue so far above us comes so high,It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
Robert Frost
Whenever the balance of power was unequal, there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject.
Marge Piercy
I sit beside my lonely fire and pray for wisdom yet: for calmness to remember or courage to forget.
Charles Hamilton Aide
Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was neverless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm.
Mervyn Peake
Nosferatu is the daddy of modern American sex.
Andrei Codrescu
Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing, sooner than war.
Homer
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?
Sylvia Plath
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
Maya Angelou
Life runs in a narrow path to balancing act, convincing tact, and satisfying fact.
Santosh Kalwar
Yes, silence is painful, but if you endure it, you will hear the cadence of the entire universe.
Kamand Kojouri
Seldom can the heart be lonely If it seeks a lonelier still Self-forgetting seeking only Emptier cups of love to fill.
Frances Ridley Havergal
He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
W.H. Auden
For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.
Thomas M. Disch
A bride, before a "Good-night" could be said,Should vanish from her clothes into her bed,As souls from bodies steal, and are not spied.But now she's laid; what though she be?Yet there are more delays, for where is he?He comes and passeth through sphere after sphere;First her sheets, then her arms, then anywhere.Let not this day, then, but this night be thine;Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine.
John Donne
People spend their entire lives fearing the very thing you apparently crave. They do anything they can to delay the process or fool themselves into believing it’s farther away than it actually is. With every passing year, with every milestone, they only feel more anxiety, more inclination to defeat this inevitability of nature, only to realize that they’ve fostered an entire life of crippling fear, wasted on the fixation of its end. And there you sit, begging for it.
Luna DeMasi
Make hay while the sun shines.
Miguel de Cervantes
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
Kahlil Gibran
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
Siri Hustvedt
These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind
Hilaire Belloc
I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can.
Jack Kerouac
Whether or not it is clear to you,no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Max Ehrmann
Live for your country, die to yourself; live for yourself, die to your country.
Anthony Liccione
An oak tree and a rosebush grew,Young and green together,Talking the talk of growing things-Wind and water and weather.And while the rosebush sweetly bloomedThe oak tree grew so highThat now it spoke of newer things-Eagles, mountain peaks and sky."I guess you think you're pretty great,"The rose was heard to cry,Screaming as loud as it possibly couldTo the treetop in the sky."And now you have no time for flower talk,Now that you've grown so tall.""It's not so much that I've grown," said the tree,"It's just that you've stayed so small.
Shel Silverstein
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
John Keats
Dare to begin! He who postpones living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
Horace
I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.
Philip Levine
Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.
Dejan Stojanovic
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
William Shakespeare
At the moment when the road looks the harshest, and you think you cannot continue on that is when you relearn your first mode of transportation; you crawl. You dig your fingers into the dirt, and propel yourself forward with your toes, but you never give up. You've gotta learn to bend with the sway. You never know what is around the next curve.
Sai Marie Johnson
A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.
Dōgen
You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.
Thulani Davis
I know you're tired but come, this is the way.
Jalaluddin Rumi