Quotes by Poets - Page 461

Do not keep the slanderer away,treat him with affection and honor:Body and soul, he scours all clean,babbling about this and that.
Kabir
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat with an indolent expression and an undulating throat like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
It is the mind that maketh good of ill that maketh wretch or happy rich or poor.
Edmund Spenser
The fact is we all know that there exists in the world an order different from that in which we pass our days. If we reveal its existence people think that we are crazy.
Andrei Codrescu
It seems it doesn't pay to be good anymore, when people are short-changing you for evil.
Anthony Liccione
I brought a knife to the gunfight. I am the knife. I am all blade.
Clementine von Radics
Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. They flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.
Carl Sandburg
Song falls silent, music is dumb,But the air burns with their fragrance,And white winter, on its knees,Observes everything with reverent attention.
Anna Akhmatova
The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers, A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace. And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion. Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best. It was impossib1e, and with form. They rode in sunlight, Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal. Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches. The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment. It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse, And the failure to sustain even small kindness. Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being. Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality. Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh. Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope. The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo. The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding. Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage, Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty That is of many days. Steady and clear. It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
Jack Gilbert
On this day, take time to remember those who have fallen. But on every day after, do more; put the freedoms they died for to greater and nobler uses.
Richelle E. Goodrich
In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home to my grandparents.
Rachel Manley
[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells.
Christine de Pizan
The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.
Roger Zelazny
How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me?I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me.Your wife can’t be a banshee—Or can she?
Ogden Nash
Street children are lovely blossoms just dropped from the tree after a heavy storm. Now they need to be put together with a needle and threads of security and shelter to live into a beautiful circle of life’s garland
Munia Khan
For all the normal people who make fun of the mentally ill it's spelled K.A.R.M.A. and it's pronounced your days coming, Bitch!
Stanley Victor Paskavich
So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.
Herman Melville
I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.
David Lovelace
Had I known but yesterday what I know today,I’d have taken out your two gray eyesAnd put in eyes of clay;And had I known but yesterday you’d be no more my ownI’d have taken out your heart of fleshAnd put in one of stone
Tam Lin Neville
If pain doesn't lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems
Walt Whitman
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng but in ourselves are triumph and defeat.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Man is not to direct or to be directed anymore than a tree or a cloud or a stoneMan is not to rule or be ruled anymore than a faith or a truth or a loveMan is not to doubt or to be doubted anymore than a wave or a seed or a fireThere is no problem in living which life hasn't answered to its own needAnd we cannot direct, rule, or doubt what is beyond our highest ability to understand we can only be humble before it we can only worship ourselves because we are a part of itThe eye in the leaf is watching out of our fingersThe ear in the stone is listening through our voicesThe thought of the wave is thinking in our dreamsThe faith of the seed is building with our deaths
Kenneth Patchen
Not the slow Hearse, where nod the sable plumes,     The Parian Statue, bending o'er the Urn,     The dark robe floating, the dejection worn     On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes     It pays Affection's debt, is due concern     To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mournFashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame     Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day,     She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame,     O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light and life, a reunited love!
Anna Seward
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
William Shakespeare
I don’t mind losing in this game of love, if it means You will be the winner.
Kamand Kojouri
Hast thou found out, Voltaire, that it is bliss to die, And does thy hideous smile over thy bleached bones fly?
Alfred de Musset
Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life and from their hands it comes in fair articulate forms to bless the world.
Josiah Gilbert Holland
A knavish speech sleeps in a fool's ear.
William Shakespeare
My mother does not own my hands, though she works hard to train them. My mother does not own my eyes, though she frequently directs their focus. My mother does not own my mind, though she yields great influence upon it. My heart, however, she owns completely, for it was hers the day I was born.
Richelle E. Goodrich
A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.
Emily Dickinson
I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.
Sylvia Plath
I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.
André Breton
She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story.
Catherynne M. Valente
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Society tells me to follow my own truth, but I don't let society tell me what to do. If you need someone to tell you that, chances are you're part of the crowd that will move on to the next fashion that comes around.
Criss Jami
A Harvey Nicks chick with throwaway morals and a trustfund appetite.
Saira Viola
What seems real one moment is fiction the nextand gone out of existence the moment after that.Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth,and change our only constancy.
David Budbill
Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself - what you’re wearing, who you’re around, what you’re doing. Recreate and repeat.
Warsan Shire
I remember you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know.
Pablo Neruda
All people are enslaved by something.
Dejan Stojanovic
O visionary world condition strange Where naught abiding is but only change.
James Russell Lowell
Never allow anyone to take you out of character, some people know which buttons to press. (Zip it instead)
Charmaine J.Forde
the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
Annie Finch
Spurious fame spreads from tongue to tongue like the fog of the early dawn before the sun rises.
Rabindranath Tagore
Once upon a time there was a poor child with no father and no mother everything was deadand no one was left in the whole world.Everything was deadand it went and searched day and night And since nobody was left on the earth it wanted to go up to the heavens and the moon was looking at it so friendly and when it finally got to the moon the moon was a piece of rotten wood and then it went to the sun and when it got there the sun was a wilted sunflower and when it got to the stars they were little golden flies stuck up therelike the shrike sticks 'em on the blackthorn and when it wanted to go back down to earth the earth was an overturned piss pot! and was all alone.
Georg Büchner
I'll tell you something," said Francis,urgent with shoe lace, "if we keep on saying things weren't when we know perfectly well they were, we shall soon dish up any sort of chance of magic we may ever have had. When do you find people in books going on like that? They just say 'This is magic!' and behave as if it was. They don't go pretending they're not sure. Why, no magic would stand it."Book: Wet Magic, Chapter 2
E Nesbit
Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
Pablo Neruda
Sometimes the burden of love is heavier than a heavy heart
Munia Khan
The cares of today are seldom those of tomorrow.
William Cowper
Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
Thomas Hardy
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
William Shakespeare
great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it.
Charles Bukowski
Everything I am seems to be inside my awareness, rather than my awareness being inside of me.
Jay Woodman
This is wisdom: to love wine beauty and the heavenly spring. That's sufficient-the rest is worthless.
Theodore De Banville
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
Siri Hustvedt
Remembering our loved ones is breathing life into their fading images, that we might once more see their faces and pass along a tearful “I miss you.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Well begun is half done.
Horace
AH the fat's in the fire.
John Marston
Nobody can turn you into a slave unless you allow them. Nobody can make you afraid of anything, unless you allow them. Nobody can tell you to do something wrong, unless you allow them. God never created you to be a slave, man did. God never created division or set up any borders between brothers, man did. God never told you hurt or kill another, man did. So why is man your god, and not the Creator?
Suzy Kassem