Quotes by Poets - Page 465

There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense.
Fernando Pessoa
I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?
Martijn Benders
Now seen...now gone,The butterfly flits in and outThrough fence-hung flowers;But a life lived so close to themI envy...though it's here and gone.
Saigyō
For Art may err but Nature cannot miss.
John Dryden
We’d like to think that our youth was madder, brighter, happier than it was. It comforts us as we grow older, to believe that once upon a time we danced at dawn in a fountain.
Robert Nathan
To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.
Catherynne M. Valente
Men with Honor are not killed by swords, they die of Shame.
Alok Jagawat
He who laughs last ... just didn't get the joke.
Carroll Bryant
Best to live and love by the maxim that 'silence in the face of evil is evil itself', but when it's evil fighting evil, let evil kill itself.
Criss Jami
I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Yo me salgo desnudo a la calle,maduro de versos perdidos.I step naked into the streetripe with lost poems.
Federico García Lorca
We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk.
Thomas Moore
Summer grasses,All that remainsOf soldiers' dreams
Bashō Matsuo
It was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as felt them in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.
Jonathan Galassi
...that in former ages they had been as wise as they are in this present, nay, wiser; for, said they, many in this age do think their forefathers have been fools, by which they prove themselves to be such.
Margaret Cavendish
Faith in oneself ... is the best and safest course.
Michelangelo
Sometimes I sit alone under the stars and think of the galaxies inside my heart and truly wonder if anyone will ever want to make sense of all that I am
Christopher Poindexter
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
I dislike interaction. The less I say the better I feel. I was naturally a loner. I didn’t want conversation, or to goanywhere. I didn’t understand other people who wanted to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I was drawn to all the wrong things: I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. Relationships never worked with me. I alwayslost interest. I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings.
Charles Bukowski
Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
The people are the city.
William Shakespeare
I had someone once who made every day mean something.And now…. I am lost….And nothing means anything anymore.
Ranata Suzuki
We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do: we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them."- On the Right Use of Time
Joseph Addison
The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.
Denis Johnson
I remember yoursaying: "make itor break it."neither happened anditwon't.
Charles Bukowski
I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
A pine tree standeth lonelyIn the North on an upland bare;It standeth whitely shroudedWith snow, and sleepeth there.It dreameth of a Palm treeWhich far in the East alone,In the mournful silence standethOn its ridge of burning stone.
Heinrich Heine
Work is love made visible. And if you can't work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy
Kahlil Gibran
The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.
Roman Payne
Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.
Sherman Alexie
We were created with more than five senses. Apart from the basic five, we also have the gut and the third eye. The gut being the seat of all feeling, and the third eye being the seat of intuition (foresight).
Suzy Kassem
Silence is also a form of speaking.
Herta Müller
I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. 'I don't know', I said. 'Tomorrow.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.
Hermann Hesse
DuendeI can't remember her name.It's not as though I've been in bedwith that many women.The truth is I can't even rememberher face. I kind of know how strongher thighs were, and her beauty.But what I won't forgetis the way she tore openthe barbecued chicken with her hands,and wiped the grease on her breasts.
Jack Gilbert
In the world of imagination, all things belong.
Richard Hugo
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
Barbara Kingsolver
In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write.
Jonathan Galassi
Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me…I use entirely too much sugar and so far don’t find sucralose to be a good alternative. Also, writing is not a practice that engenders confidence. Quite the opposite. It’s about making yourself deliberately insecure so that you can write the next thing and have it be worth reading.And that’s not even taking into consideration the business end of things, which can make you bitter if you’re not careful…But I’ve spent my the bulk of my life to date figuring out the right mix of fat and sugar in my tea and also, how to get incrementally better (I hope…) at the writing, so I’m not giving it/them up!
Ariel Gordon
Superman’s scourge is kryptonite. Fear’s kryptonite is laughter.
Richelle E. Goodrich
April is the crudest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing Memory and desire stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S Eliot
Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.
Marge Piercy
Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
Margaret Atwood
One can't work/by limelight.//A bowlful/right at/one's elbow//produces no/more than/a baleful/glow against/the kitchen table.//The fruit purveyor's/whole unstable/pyramid//doesn't equal/what daylight did.
Kay Ryan
Got dreams in my mind that got me hustling all the time.
Osama Al-Hasan
It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational.
Thomas M. Disch
For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our childrenso longfor the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fatherswe live
Saul Williams
By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.
Richelle E. Goodrich
But for their cries,The herons would be lostAmidst the morning snow.
Chiyo Ni
I'm sucking on a cancer stick trying to think of something inspiring to say to help someone have a better life. That's "Irony".
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
Pablo Neruda
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
Gertrude Stein
All Mad"'He is mad as a hare, poor fellow, And should be in chains,' you say,I haven't a doubt of your statement, But who isn't mad, I pray?Why, the world is a great asylum, And the people are all insane,Gone daft with pleasure or folly, Or crazed with passion and pain.The infant who shrieks at a shadow, The child with his Santa Claus faith,The woman who worships Dame Fashion, Each man with his notions of death,The miser who hoards up his earnings, The spendthrift who wastes them too soon,The scholar grown blind in his delving, The lover who stares at the moon.The poet who thinks life a paean, The cynic who thinks it a fraud,The youth who goes seeking for pleasure, The preacher who dares talk of God,All priests with their creeds and their croaking, All doubters who dare to deny,The gay who find aught to wake laughter, The sad who find aught worth a sigh,Whoever is downcast or solemn, Whoever is gleeful and gay,Are only the dupes of delusions— We are all of us—all of us mad.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.
Herman Melville
... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Is it God? Did God set up the dominoes and wait for some human to flick the first one? Or is it the opposite way around? Did humans set them up so God could do the flicking?
Allan Wolf
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths but he has not been able to destroy them.
Octavio Paz
The weight of wait.
Cameron Conaway
On the far horizon waved some flicker of lightMy heart, a city of suffering, awoke in a state of dreamMy eyes, turning restless, still dreaming,the morning, dawning in this vacuous abode of separation.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz