Quotes by Poets - Page 354

Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn’t blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen.
Roman Payne
You can't do it better without teamwork.
Ogwo David Emenike
Stand up for what is right, regardless of who is committing the wrong.
Suzy Kassem
I you can't see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror. Look a little closer, stare a little longer. Because there is something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, you signed it THEY WERE WRONG.
Shane L. Koyczan
Stand up for what you believe in even if it means standing alone.
Suzy Kassem
Rusted FlowersFrom her heart’stear-salted soil,rusted flowers grew.A serrated beauty;wounding all those who bent near.
John Mark Green
The Mania SpeaksYou clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil.I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein?Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER? I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed was a shredded sweater and a police warning? You should be legend by now.Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline.I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon.Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull.I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots. Now you want out? Think you’ll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions?A good man’s good love and some breathing exercises? You think I can’t tame that? I always come home. Always. Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody: I’m bigger than God.
Jeanann Verlee
If ever you feel like an animal among men, be a lion.
Criss Jami
Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
Erica Jong
We would be a few years younger,if every day we meditated for five minutes on the meanings of the word innocence.
Alexandra Vasiliu
You’re breaking up with me because I’m not a successful guitarist, and because I seem like I’m just a guy handing out pamphlets on a street corner! You’re disgusted.” This is why Adrian is disgusted with Adrian and has nothing to do with me. Very little of our relationship has much to do with me, which is one of the actual reasons I’m breaking up with him. He loves me but doesn’t really understand me – so, in effect, does he really love me?
Gregory Sherl
Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.(In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)
Ovid
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Maya Angelou
Only the ideas penetrate and prevail nothing unless one has the knowledge, to bring that into the practical form; otherwise, buying the ideas, shows one's idiocy.
Ehsan Sehgal
Sacred space in whichTo distil, like amber,The best of your love.
Scott Hastie
Truth does not sit in a cave and hide like a lie. It wanders around proudly and roars loudly like a lion.
Suzy Kassem
Have you honestly pondered your individual worth? Consider every lower life form in the world—the animals, plants, fouls and fishes. Consider the land forms and numerous earthly wonders. Consider the countless worlds beyond this planet as well as their stars and galaxies. And then consider yourself. Of all God’s creations, you were formed in His image, resembling the likeness of a God. That’s something to think about.
Richelle E. Goodrich
                And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been                    Had we not taken his place.
Mark Strand
Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. Never in any other time, or any other civilization, have people thought so much or so contantly about aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks always in the same direction). This weighing up of pleasure and pain, which everyone is forced to make sooner or later, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.
Michel Houellebecq
I recognise your body in liana; your expression in the eyes of a frightened gazelle; the beauty of your face in that of the moon, your tresses in the plumage of peacocks... alas! Timid friend- no one object compares to you.
Kālidāsa
What will you do now with the gift of your left life?
Carol Ann Duffy
All the dreams you show up in are not your own.
Gil Scott-Heron
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
Ben Lerner
In one kiss, you'll know all I haven't said.
Pablo Neruda
And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night
Archibald MacLeish
Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly.
Criss Jami
Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
Russell Banks
...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
Robert Penn Warren
But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It's a cathedral. It's an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair hope... What if I get no answer there? If God hasn't spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don't be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger ...
Mary Karr
There is satiety in all things in sleep and love-making in the loveliness of singing and the innocent dance.
Homer
All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
William Carlos Williams
The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
I don't believe that the course of anyone's lifetime has ever been as unerring as that of the rising and setting sun, but I know many lives that have been just as inspiring.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world of speculation.What might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.
T.S Eliot
I often wonder why I am the one who remember all the pain?
Sherman Alexie
Autumn is a cunning muse who steals by degrees my warmth and light. So distracted by her glorious painting of colors, I scarcely realize my losses until the last fiery leaf has fallen to the ground and the final pumpkin shrinks. Autumn departs with a cold kiss, leaving me to suffer the frigid grasp of winter in prolonged nightfall.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.
Walter de la Mare
Wake up. If your eyes are sleeping then wipe them gently. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death. Wake up! If your mind is sleeping then shake it quickly. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death. Wake up, I said! If your heart is sleeping then beat your chest! You need to be awake for life! You need to be awake for love! It is a matter of living and being alive.
Kamand Kojouri
Know thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is man.
Alexander Pope
To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?
Maggie Nelson
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
Lewis Thomas
Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams,The dogs lie around like rugs
Charles Wright
When you stress out, things will stress out around you. Always control your thoughts and pacify any unnecessary stress. Control your vibrations and you are the master of your own harmony.
Suzy Kassem
Captain," said the squire, "the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?""Strike my colours!" cried the captain, "No sir, not I"...
Robert Louis Stevenson
Loving you was like going to war I never came back the same.
Warsan Shire
But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and played the role of Death. Because, how can Death possibly die?
Alejandra Pizarnik
Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.
Sylvia Plath
Adults havethe benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct.When we “grow up” we gain this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence andsense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for growing up is a permanent sense ofloss.
Alberto Alvaro Ríos
The best people always care their goodness, civility, courtesy, and fairness. But not the bad.
Ehsan Sehgal
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
Margaret Atwood
She is a wild, tangled forest with temples and treasures concealed within.
John Mark Green
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
George Santayana
Nothing threatens a corrupt system more than a free mind.
Suzy Kassem
Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.
Kamand Kojouri
I exist as I am that is enough If no other in the world be aware I sit content And if each and all be aware I sit content.
Walt Whitman
One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: "You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?
Yehuda HaLevi
But virtue, as it never will be moved,Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,Will sate itself in a celestial bedAnd prey on garbage.
William Shakespeare
I do not take advice from people who are 100 percent sure. I take advice from those that believe they are as close to sure as possible, but understand they could be completely wrong.
Marc Marcel
The Women of Our World are like Mother Earth. They don't just give life to the next generation but also to Hope. The Women of Our World are to be loved, respected and protected.
Avijeet Das
Everything is possible for him who possesses courage and activity,'' she said, with a look resembling one of those heroines of the age of chivalry, whose encouragement was wont to give champions double valour at the hour of need; ``and to the timid and hesitating, everything is impossible, because it seems so.
Walter Scott