Quotes by American Authors - Page 80

90% of the politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation.
Henry Kissinger
This is the first convention of the space age - where a candidate can promise the moon and mean it.
David Brinkley
The attributes of a great lady may still be found in the rule of the four S's: Sincerity Simplicity Sympathy and Serenity.
Emily Post
This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.
William Lyon Phelps
(A gentleman) is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.
Fred Allen
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer
I can't stand a naked light bulb any more than I can stand a rude remark or a vulgar action.
Tennessee Williams
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
There is always a best way of doing everything if it be only to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ah men do not know how much strength is in poise that he goes the farthest who goes far enough.
James Russell Lowell
If a man didn't make sense the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.
J. K. Galbraith
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Mark Twain
The opposite of talking is not listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz
Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.
Oliver Herford
Don't throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery.
Philander Johnson
For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
Sylvia Plath
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.
Maxwell Bodenheim
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
Poets aren't very useful because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.
Ogden Nash
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
Walt Whitman
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
Phyllis McGinley
A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
Poetry is a mug's game.
T.S Eliot
The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
T.S Eliot
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
Christopher Morley
When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Marianne Moore
No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T.S Eliot
When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.
T.S Eliot
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.
Robert Frost
A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.
William Ellery Channing
A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E B White
Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
Henry David Thoreau
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
T.S Eliot
Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
With me poetry has not been a purpose but a passion.
Edgar Allan Poe
All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them but what is universal.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
All men are poets at heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure and pleasure my business.
Aaron Burr
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors Landor replies "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Goethe said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others.
Charlotte Cushman
Most plagiarists like the drone have neither taste to select industry to acquire nor skill to improve but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared from the hive.
Walter Colton
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
Diane Arbus
Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face - the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
Susan Sontag
If you scratch a great photograph you find two things: a painting and a photograph.
Janet Malcolm
You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
Diane Arbus
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Atkinson