Quotes by Poets - Page 349

O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.
Robert Burns
I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.
Roger Zelazny
Screw your courage to the sticking-place
William Shakespeare
No shade no shine no butterflies no bees No fruits no flowers no leaves no birds November!
Thomas Hood
I am a moonbeam free to go whenever I choose.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Can anything be sadder than work unfinished? Yes work never begun.
Christina Rossetti
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Wilfred Owen
Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.
Margaret Atwood
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe and restores to us forgotten paradises.
Edith Sitwell
Everybody's serious but me.
Allen Ginsberg
Besides, the story is ambivalent and mysterious in its ending. Is this Alkestis returning from down below? Why does she have a veil over her face? Could it be that when we forcefully bring back to life what has been lost through love what we get is only a shate of its former reality? Maybe we can never succeed fully in restoring the soul to life. Maybe she will always be veiled and at least partially shielded from the rigors of actual life. Love demands a submission that is total.
Thomas Moore
Ah, Nothing is too late, till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sometimes you will do good things and not get an acknowledgement for it. Don't let that dishearten you, the world is a better place with your good deeds.
Gift Gugu Mona
The old man slowly raised himself from the piano stool, fixed those cheerful blue eyes piercingly and at the same time with unimaginable friendliness upon him, and said: "Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph.
Hermann Hesse
How to Write a PoemCatch the airaround the butterfly.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads
Federico García Lorca
Holding the moon in your hands, velvety, your heart beats on my lips.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Marriage is a million piece puzzle, a pristine and exciting pursuit at the beginning that gradually becomes a daunting task, usually more challenging than anticipated.   It is only those truly committed to solving that puzzle who witness in the end the miraculous outcome of every tiny piece laid out and pressed together in an inspiring and envious creation—a treasure only time, resoluteness, and perseverance could create. 
Richelle E. Goodrich
[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.
Roman Payne
Sometimes people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it. Liyana had seen this happen even in elementary school. Somebody wasn't fair to somebody and the hurt person just held it in. By the end of the year they had nearly disappeared. But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up – even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn't get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake it loose, but no one liked them by now.Liyana wondered if the person who could let it out the same size it was to begin with, was luckiest.In Jerusalem, so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names.
Naomi Shibab Nye
Competition works best in sports, but humans get addicted to stuff.
Criss Jami
I love belief it can move the pallet on a Ouija board or put a man into space. The problem that we have is the wrong beliefs we can't erase.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the slightest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.
Hsin Hsin Ming
The RemoteI often think about youwhen I’m lying alone inmy room with my mouthopen and the remotelost somewhere in the bed.
Leonard Cohen
I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.
Fernando Pessoa
Dance your Soulful path / and you shall know the magic / of your mind & heart / and all the beauty laughing / to fill your rising self.
Jay Woodman
In your quest for peace within, you follow several paths. Over a period of time, the path which is meant for you shows up just like the opening up of petals of a bud. Tread on it and make the world more beautiful!
Neelam Saxena Chandra
...we take care not to touch each other in public, nor do we look into each other's eyes except furtively, because Ivan must first wash my eyes with his own, removing the images which landed on my retina before his arrival.
Ingeborg Bachmann
My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
Charles Bukowski
Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Deep-versed in books And shallow in himself.
John Milton
This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.
Kurt Schwitters
The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Girl Without HandsWalking through the ruinson your way to workthat do not look like ruinswith the sunlight pouring overthe seen worldlike hail or meltedsilver, that brightand magnificent, each leafand stone quickened and specific in it,and you can't hold it,you can't hold any of it. Distance surrounds you,marked out by the ends of your armswhen they are stretched to their fullest.You can go no farther than this,you think, walking forward,pushing the distance in front of youlike a metal cart on wheelswith its barriers and horizontals.Appearance melts away from you,the offices and pyramidson the horizon shimmer and cease.No one can enter that circleyou have made, that clean circleof dead space you have madeand stay inside,mourning because it is clean.Then there's the girl, in the white dress,meaning purity, or the failureto be any colour. She has no hands, it's true.The scream that happened to the airwhen they were taken offsurrounds her now like an aureoleof hot sand, of no sound.Everything has bled out of her.Only a girl like thiscan know what's happened to you.If she were here she wouldreach out her arms towardsyou now, and touch youwith her absent handsand you would feel nothing, but you would betouched all the same.
Margaret Atwood
Is then no nook of English ground secureFrom rash assault?
William Wordsworth
When nature suffers because it is destroyed by human activities, the notion of beauty is really losing its meaning, because nothing is more aesthetic than the natural beauty.
Marieta Maglas
Many people have said to me that I’m a mystic. I find that a bit mysterious. I just use logic and common sense for my philosophies.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.
Thomas Hardy
All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel's. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last.
Jorge Luis Borges
My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
Dorothy Parker
People that hurt others, only act on a pain they feel themselves.
Vivian Amis
The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.
William Shakespeare
Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.
R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.
Matthew Arnold
But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
Mary Karr
I tried to bring up boyfriends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done--whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was.
Jack Kerouac
A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson
All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.
W.H. Auden
The favour of God forfeits the failure of men.
Gift Gugu Mona
There she was, the mother of me, like a lit plinth,Heavenly, though I was reared to find this kind Of visitation impractical; she was an unbearable detailOf the supreme celestial map,Of which I had been taught that there wasNo such thing.
Lucie Brock-Broido
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank not as a prophet but as an unteachable brat well birched and none the wiser.
Robert Louis Stevenson
But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.
Raymond Carver
I have lost confidence in myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and, by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
William Shakespeare
Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
No longer mourn for me when I am deadthan you shall hear the surly sullen bell give warning to the world that I am fled from this vile world with vilest worms to dwell: nay, if you read this line, remember not the hand that writ it, for I love you so, that I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,if thinking on me then should make you woe. O! if, I say, you look upon this verse when I perhaps compounded am with clay, do not so much as my poor name rehearse; but let your love even with my life decay; lest the wise world should look into your moan, and mock you with me after I am gone.
William Shakespeare
A disciple: I am worried about human suffering all over the world. What is the solution?Spiritual leader: The solution to our miseries lie within central atom of our being, ‘I’. Once this central atom transcends to ‘WE’, human sufferings can be resolved.
Santosh Kalwar
I've never stopped wanting to cross the equator, or touch an
Rita Dove
Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is greatest thing, they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do (...It's a lie to say that love is greatest, what people want is hate - hate, and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love they get it...If we want hate, let us have it - death, murder, torture, violent destruction- let us have it: but not in the name of love.
D.H. Lawrence
What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
Bertolt Brecht