Quotes by Poets - Page 44

When disinformation is running rampant, there are two ignorances that may emerge: the one is actually positive, a sort of pure and intentional emptying of the mind; but the other is of course negative and clogged and polluted.
Criss Jami
Oh how I hate people!
Mervyn Peake
Either to die the death or to abjureFor ever the society of men.Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires;Know of your youth, examine well your blood,Whether, if you yield not to your father's choice,You can endure the livery of a nun,For aye to be in shady cloister mew'd,To live a barren sister all your life,Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.Thrice-blessed they that master so their blood,To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,Than that which withering on the virgin thornGrows, lives and dies in single blessedness.
William Shakespeare
I pass and I stay, like the Universe.
Alberto Caeiro
...whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.
Barbara Kingsolver
Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest
Alfred de Musset
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe
Thus Time, and all-states-ordering CeremonyHad banished all offense: Time’s golden thighUpholds the flowery body of the earthIn sacred harmony, and every birthOf men and actions makes legitimate,Being used aright. The use of time is Fate.---From “Hero and Leander, Sestiad III
Christopher Marlowe
Please lift your snowy skies off my soul -Your diamond dreams slice through my veins
Else Lasker-Schüler
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid one are full of confidence".
Charles Bukowski
I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again.
Anna Akhmatova
We are all connected. When one arm or foot is poisoned, the whole body becomes infected.
Suzy Kassem
I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.
Maya Angelou
Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.
Thomas Hardy
I went down not long agoto the Mad River, under the willowsI knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call itwhat madness you will, there's a sicknessworse than the risk of death and that'sforgetting what we should never forget.Tecumseh lived here.The wounds of the pastare ignored, but hang onlike the litter that snags among the yellow branches,newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.Where are the Shawnee now?Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington, and even then,whatever they said,would you believe it? SometimesI would like to paint my body red and go intothe glittering snowto die.His name meant Shooting Star.From Mad River country north to the borderhe gathered the tribesand armed them one more time. He vowedto keep Ohio and it took himover twenty years to fail.After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,it was over, excepthis body could not be found,and you can do whatever you want with that, sayhis people came in the black leaves of the nightand hauled him to a secret grave, or thathe turned into a little boy again, and leapedinto a birch canoe and wentrowing home down the rivers. Anywaythis much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it,he will still beso angry.
Mary Oliver
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.
Kahlil Gibran
When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around us becomeslight, rare, sterile.We breathe, briefly.Our eyes, briefly,see witha hurtful clarity.Our memory, suddenly sharpened,examines,gnaws on kind wordsunsaid,promised walksnever taken.Great souls die andour reality, bound tothem, takes leave of us.Our souls,dependent upon theirnurture,now shrink, wizened.Our minds, formedand informed by theirradiance,fall away.We are not so much maddenedas reduced to the unutterable ignoranceof dark, coldcaves.And when great souls die,after a period peace blooms,slowly and alwaysirregularly. Spaces fillwith a kind ofsoothing electric vibration.Our senses, restored, neverto be the same, whisper to us.They existed. They existed.We can be. Be and bebetter. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
The worst Persian voluptuary could never have imagined my most ordinary day.
Lew Welch
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
Hermann Hesse
To imagine is to risk being mentally blind.
Ogwo David Emenike
Think the tree that bears nutrition:though the fruits are picked, the plant maintains fruition.So give all the love you have.Do not hold any in reserve.What is given is not lost; it shall return.
Kamand Kojouri
It seems when Opportunity knocks, Fate shows up to open the door.
Anthony Liccione
I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them.
Nicholas Trandahl
EARLY BIRDOh, if you’re a bird, be an early birdAnd catch the worm for your breakfast plate.If you’re a bird, be an early early bird--But if you’re a worm, sleep late.
Shel Silverstein
I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
Alberto Caeiro
Find out how Claude and Kelly end up from being Friends 2 Lovers as you follow them through their disappointing, confusing, loving, shocking,encouraging, and romantic moments. But can their bond last and withstand all the challenges that cross their way?
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
I will learn your anger. I will lick your sadness.I will feast on your hunger.
Caitlyn Siehl
Be yourself because an original is worth more than just a copy.
Suzy Kassem
Sometimes I feel that our bright blue sky is like a pregnant women’s belly.
Santosh Kalwar
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,There is a rapture on the lonely shore,There is society, where none intrudes,By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:I love not Man the less, but Nature more,From these our interviews, in which I stealFrom all I may be, or have been before,To mingle with the Universe, and feelWhat I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
George Gordon Byron
Taffeta phrases silken terms precise Three-piled hyperboles spruce affectation Figures pedantical.
William Shakespeare
She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?
Anne Carson
All good poems are victories over something.
Stephen Dunn
I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes happy and on some people’s hearts he writes sad and on some people’s hearts he writes crazy and on some people’s hearts he writes genius and on some people’s hearts he writes angry and on some people’s hearts he writes winner and on some people’s hearts he writes loser.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
(Everyday life is like a sack: with holes. And you carry it anyway.)
Marina Tsvetaeva
Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?
Richelle E. Goodrich
Despite every objection; they sank into insignificance - and in the end, love, was the answer to everything.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it never in the tongue Of him that makes it.
William Shakespeare
Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives! Fight on; death is better than defeat! Fight on brave knights! for bright eyes behold your deeds!
Walter Scott
Give me your tired your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these the homeless tempest tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Emma Lazarus
There is no good envy, except the one that motivates us to reach higher goals and be better than the person we were yesterday.
Ogwo David Emenike
I walk through the old yellow sunlightto get to my kitchen tablethe poem about melying there with the booksin which I am listedamong the dead and future Dylans
Leonard Cohen
...because if there was one thing he didn't like it was big words, they just lied and covered things up, those big words, they didn't let what really was live and breathe but just carried it off into something that wanted to be big, that's what he thought...
Jon Fosse
Though people are laughing at the dirt surrounding you, they are missing to see the seeds also planted, growing silently within.
Anthony Liccione
The priestess of Artemis took hold of her almost with the violence of a lover, and whisked her away into a languid ecstasy of reverie. She communicated her own enthusiasm to the girl, and kept her mind occupied with dreams, faery-fervid, of uncharted seas of glory on which her galleon might sail, undiscovered countries of spice and sweetness, Eldorado and Utopia and the City of God.
Aleister Crowley
In Heaven, it is always Autumn".
John Donne
Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.
Walter Scott
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)
Jack Kerouac
If the sum of living be love's fee,Tremble. You are my one eternity.
Laura Benet
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Kahlil Gibran
it is being honest about my painthat makes me invincible.
Nayyirah Waheed
I write so others might contemplate things that are out of the ordinary. I write to make people feel—to cause laughter and tears and anger at injustice. I write so the world will imagine and wonder at crazy, incredible truths. I write to have a tiny bit of influence on a universal conscience.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Beware of those who speak negatively about everything and everybody. A negative person will never say a positive thing about you.
Suzy Kassem
I do not want to be like a small animal bitten by a snake, going stiff with that poison. I want to bite back.
Yvette Christiansë
And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.
May Sarton
Let's tell the truth to people. When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avaoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don't want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.
Maya Angelou
Oh! Much may be done by defying The ghosts of Despair and Dismay And much may be gained by relying On "Where there's a Will There's a Way."
Eliza Cook
Energy defines life not flesh and blood. WE are infinite energies experiencing infinity. Through a finite aperture.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
The artist like the idiot or clown sits on the edge of the world and a push may send him over it.
Osbert Sitwell