Quotes by Poets - Page 431

There are trials in life that feel as tremendous as a quest to slay dragons. These trials are daunting. They require hard work, determination, and courage. But when the dragon is finally slain, the relief is immense.
Richelle E. Goodrich
This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.
Catherynne M. Valente
Let us remember to always rediscover one anotherbecause we are forever changing.
Kamand Kojouri
All seems infected that the infected spy as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Alexander Pope
Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,Or any searcher know by mortal mind,Veil after veil will lift--but there must be Veil upon veil behind.
Edwin Arnold
Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others' faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear.
Jalaluddin Rumi
My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.
Kahlil Gibran
He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.
Margaret Atwood
something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace
E.E. Cummings
A friend in need is a friend indeed.
Richard Graves
Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it.
William Shakespeare
We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.
Kamand Kojouri
A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
Catherynne M. Valente
Happiness found me alone one day and took me by the hand.He showed me how the sun gave out its warmth across the land.Sadness found me content and smiling upward at the sun.He talked of droughts and blindness and what burning rays had done.Happiness found me alone again and pointed to the sky.He showed me how the storms created rainbows way up high.Sadness found me intrigued and took me to the rainbow’s end.He showed me how it disappeared to ne’er return again.Happiness found me alone and taught me how to sing a song.He sang a dozen melodies as I chirped right along.Sadness found me singing out and covered up his ears.He said the noise was deafening, and wished he couldn’t hear.Happiness found me alone and gave me seven coins of gold.He showed me many fancy things that merchants often sold.Sadness found me admiring the pretty things I’d bought.He pointed out my empty purse and money I had not.Happiness found me alone and helped me talk to someone new.He called the boy my friend and said that I was his friend too.Sadness found me together with my kind, attentive friend.He whispered of betrayal and how broken hearts don’t mend.Happiness found me alone and held me tight in his embrace.He whispered kindness in my ear and kissed me on the face.Sadness found me with Happiness but before he spoke at all,I told him he’d have better luck at talking to the wall.
Richelle E. Goodrich
He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.
William Shakespeare
I have loved you with all my life, and you've agreed to be my loving wife. Now I'll forever cherish our vows in my heart,"In sickness and in health, till death do us part.
Alon Calinao Dy
The way you make love is the way God will be with you.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
Sylvia Plath
Hands burn for a stone, a bomb, to shiver down the glass. Nothing's changed.
Tatamkhulu Afrika
The more we understand the One Idea, how all of life is interconnected and interdependent, the more we can act in positive ways for the good of all.
Laurence Overmire
There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.
Rainer Maria Rilke
What is more yours than what always holds you back?
James Richardson
Life is a combo of attachment and detachment. Love is the most natural thing and you are bound to get attached to persons, places and things. However, while getting attached so, you should know that all these attachments too have an expiry date. It's exactly at that point that the art of detachment helps. Persons, places and things are meant for specific periods in life after which you should know how to let go and embrace newer things. The world is beautiful and you should have belief in Him.
Neelam Saxena Chandra
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.
Lewis Thomas
The only thing in life that matters is the moment, not the past, not the future, just what you do can with the moment you have. Think of how many moments you have wasted, thinking and not doing, contemplating and not doing, sulking and not doing. Do something with your moment!
Marc Marcel
Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.
Jack Kerouac
Nature, it seems, is the popular namefor milliards and milliards and milliardsof particles playing their infinite gameof billiards and billiards and billiards.
Piet Hein
Do not believe that you alone can be right.The man who thinks that,The man who maintains that only he has the powerTo reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.
Sophocles
Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.
Jorge Luis Borges
Forgetting is the cost of living cheerfully.
Zoe Akins
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,And, while the bubbling and loud hissing urnThrows up a steamy column and the cupsThat cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,So let us welcome peaceful ev'ning in.
William Cowper
A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.
Gertrude Stein
No day shall erase you from the memory of time
Virgil
So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which movesTo that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant
If I do not love my fellow man, I can be sure of it that I do not love Jesus Christ. And I would do well if guilty of loving Jesus Christ even more than I love my fellow man, because only by this may I fully come to love my fellow man.
Criss Jami
Oh, no, no, you've got that all wrong. You're not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they're idiots. Especially if they're idiots. You can't just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they're crazy.
Sherman Alexie
The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.
Gérard de Nerval
The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.
George Santayana
Modern man has a need for simplification that tends to find its expression one way or another. And this artificial monotony which he takes pains to create, this monotony which is slowly taking over the world, this monotony is the sign of our greatness. It bears the mark of a certain will-power, the will to utility; it is the expression of utility, a law that governs all our modern activity: the Law of Utility.
Blaise Cendrars
I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?
Dejan Stojanovic
Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.
John Milton
Life is indefinite--a bundle of contradictions. We men, with our ideas, strive to give it a particular shape by melting it into a particular mould--into the definiteness of success.
Rabindranath Tagore
You maintain hope for humanity as an infinite skeptic of gossip and slander. In all mankind's desires for entertainment and exaggeration and sensationalism, when it comes to gossip, the individual always sounds worse than he really is. This is why adhering to gossip subtly affects the mental state of the listener - he goes on holding shady opinions regardless of where the realities of their lights and darknesses may stand.
Criss Jami
I learn, I earn.
Santosh Kalwar
Beso me without desire so I may hear her coo, that grew in you
Sean Thomas Dougherty
I am Not, but the Universe is my Self.
Shih-t'ou
Soy el desesperado, la palabra sin ecos, el que lo perdiò todo, y el que todo lo tuvo.
Pablo Neruda
All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.
Lewis Thomas
Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
Knowing the Truth is not based on knowledge, but on being "it".
Vivian Amis
I have taught you my dear flock for above thirty years how to live and I will show you in a very short time how to die.
George Sandys
A poor original is better than a good imitation.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
When love beckons to you follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth......But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears. Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love. And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself."But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
Kahlil Gibran
When you love you give meaning to this world.
Sorin Cerin
Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.
Thomas Moore
Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under.
Kelli Russell Agodon
You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.
Michael Ondaatje
The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
Marge Piercy
I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning