Quotes by Poets - Page 468

The old sporadic fanaticism of religious hatred had been skillfully perverted into the cold, steady fanaticism of national hate.
Franz Werfel
Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries.
Wisława Szymborska
Never believe you're so great or important, so right or proud, that you cannot kneel at the feet of someone you hurt and offer a humble, sincere apology.
Richelle E. Goodrich
It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.
Catherynne M. Valente
Curiosity killed the cat, but not before teaching her that honey bees are not sweet, tweeting birds are slow to react, mice can serve as both toys and food, big dogs like to snuggle, falling isn’t flying, cream drips from lazy cows, water should be avoided at all costs, baths don’t require getting wet, kindness and cruelty often fall from the same hand, and engines remain comfortably warm long after the motor dies.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Madness and chaos are self-destructing but over thinking is the suicide.
Robert M. Drake
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
William Shakespeare
I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.
Walt Whitman
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.
Criss Jami
What man is there that does not laboriously though all unconsciously himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Everyone is always learning something new," my father would remind me when he checked to see if I was doing my homework and found me gazing out the window at the stars. "If not, why be alive?
Marjorie Agosín
Do you like singing?" Miriam asked her."If it is good," she said.Paul, of course, coloured."You mean if it is high-class and trained?" he said."I think a voice needs training before the singing is anything," she said."You might as well insist on having people's voices trained before you allowed them to talk," he replied. "Really, people sing for their own pleasure, as a rule.""And it may be for other people's discomfort.
D.H. Lawrence
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
Wallace Stevens
Unfortunately, nothing can protect you from the thoughts in your own head.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I know my breasts, smallas plums, would win no blue ribbons.But in your hands they tremble and fillwith song like plump, white birds.
Cecilia Llompart
Everything is hard before it is easy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting?Better go drunk and begging round the taverns.Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yoursWill make a cup, bowl, one day a jar.When once you hear the roses are in bloom,Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine;Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell-These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.
Omar Khayyám
As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I do not need any friends. I prefer enemies. They are better company and their feelings towards you are always genuine.
Dylan Thomas
This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
William Blake
No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete, imperfect, unrealised, and by virtue of temporal actions, temporary - a verb more than a noun, an inner quest and an outward odyssey framed by metaphors, like Escher's "Print Gallery"; we make the endless journey round the pictures, retracing our steps in forgetfulness, avoiding but mindful of the space where there are no pictures, where there is no gallery, where there is nothing at all. And like flies in a fly bottle, trapped by a failure of vision, we go round and round and round the moebius loop of a print gallery of our own making, a picture inside a picture inside a picture, forever.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
His love for me seemed to overflow my limits by its flood of wealth and service. But my necessity was more for giving than foe receiving; for love is a vagabond, who can make his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal jars kept in the drawing-room.
Rabindranath Tagore
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure ad moving on. Yet most people are stricken wth fear. They fear failure so much that they fail.
Charles Bukowski
If I wrote the word flower,would it still grow like a flower?If I wrote a poem concerning a river,would the water still flow in the eyes of the reader?
Zakariya Amataya
We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side.
Kahlil Gibran
I believe in love at first sight…But it’s not the first moment you lay eyes on a person, it’s the moment you first see the person they truly are.
Ranata Suzuki
Men who do not forgive women their little faults will never enjoy their great virtues.
Kahlil Gibran
Human greed feeds a creed.
Volodymyr Knyr
And sometimes if I wantTo imagine I’m a lamb(Or a whole flockSpreading out all over the hillsideSo I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),It’s only because I feel what I write at sunset,Or when a cloud passes its hand over the lightAnd silence runs over the grass outside.When I sit and write poemsOr, walking along the roads or pathways,I write poems on the paper in my thoughts,I feel a staff in my handAnd see my silhouetteOn top of a knoll,Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,With a silly smile like someone who doesn’t understand what somebody’s sayingBut tries to pretend they do.
Alberto Caeiro
During your life, never stop dreaming. No one can take away your dreams
Tupac Shakur
Love grows and wanes, but honor, duty, and commitment, those things are constant and stable. They define who you are.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Young men soon give and soon forget affronts Old age is slow in both.
Joseph Addison
Where in the world would a star be without the love of the sky?
Munia Khan
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!Here will we sit and let the sounds of musicCreep in our ears: soft stillness and the nightBecome the touches of sweet harmony.Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heavenIs thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'stBut in his motion like an angel sings,Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;Such harmony is in immortal souls;But whilst this muddy vesture of decayDoth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."- Lorenzo, Acte V, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
The right to be a cussed fool Is safe from all devices human It's common (ez a gin'I rule) To every critter born of woman.
James Russell Lowell
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Erica Jong
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Raymond Carver
Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowdAs herds of bellowing buses drive byLove's anguish tightens your throatAs if you were never to be loved againIf you lived in the old days you would enter a monasteryYou are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayerYou make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter cracklesThe sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your lifeIt's a painting hanging in a dark museumAnd sometimes you go and look at it close up
Guillaume Apollinaire
The breath of Paris pushes at my shutters.From the Balcony
Jennifer Reeser
There is more light than darkness, there has always been.
Tyler Knott Gregson
He was a dork, a dink, a dong… Why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth.
Margaret Atwood
Alas, how terrible is wisdomwhen it brings no profit to the man that's wise!This I knew well, but had forgotten it,else I would not have come here.
Sophocles
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound
The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.
Criss Jami
Life is an extraordinary gift some people appear not to appreciate. In every breath and scent, every touch and sight we are gifted by new experience and the chance to feel the richness of experience. Every sound we hear, from the song of a bird to the harshness of an angry voice, is a miracle.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Worship is not love.
Donald Hall
The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.
Siri Hustvedt
Kreon: here are Kreon's verbs for todayAdjudicateLegislateScandalizeCapitalizehere are Kreon's nounsMenReasonTreasonDeathShip of StateMineChorus: "mine" isn't a nounKreon: it is if you capitalize it
Anne Carson
A little attention, a little kindness, a little thoughtfulness are worth more than all the wealth in the world.
Avijeet Das
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The greatest reward for a man's failure is not necessarily the consequent success, but what he becomes by it.
Ogwo David Emenike
Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.
Dejan Stojanovic
It doesn't matter how green a blade of grass is expected to be, when it's already smashed beneath the feet.
Munia Khan
From heart to hearta heartbeat staggers, looking for a haven.Bereft. It is easier to enter heaventhan to pass through each others' eyes
Bill Knott
Over your breasts of motionless current,over your legs of firmness and water,over the permanence and the prideof your naked hairI want to be, my love, now that the tears arethrowninto the raucous baskets where they accumulate,I want to be, my love, alone with a syllableof mangled silver, alone with a tip of your breast of snow.
Pablo Neruda
The bliss e'en of a moment still is bliss.
Joanna Baillie