Quotes by British Authors - Page 748

To SorrowI bade good morrow,And thought to leave her far away behind;But cheerly, cheerly,She loves me dearly;She is so constant to me, and so kind.
John Keats
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
Alan W. Watts
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little or too much;Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!
Alexander Pope
Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise.
W.H. Auden
A little learning is a dangerous thing.Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,and drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope
When the immense drugged universe explodesIn a cascade of unendurable colourAnd leaves us gasping naked,This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal loveWhich alone, as we know certainly, restoresFragmentation into true being.Ecstasy of Chaos
Robert Graves
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,And how, how rare and strange it is, to findIn a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)To find a friend who has these qualities,Who has, and givesThose qualities upon which friendship lives.How much it means that I say this to you-Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!
T.S Eliot
Some girls are full of heartache and poetry and those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves instead of running away from them.
Nikita Gill
So here is my story, may it bringSome smiles and a tear or so,It happened once upon a time,Far away, and long ago,Outside the night wind keens and wails,Come listen to me, the Teller of Tales!
Brian Jacques
Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.
Joanne Harris
Ozymandias"I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we come
William Wordsworth
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.t 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.t 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?t 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
T.S Eliot
So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.
T.S Eliot
Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
George Eliot
..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
G.K. Chesterton
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe."Beware the Jabberwock, my son The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought—So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought.And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back."And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy!O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy.'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carroll
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.
Nikita Gill
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.
G.K. Chesterton
I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me: and to meHigh mountains are a feeling, but the humof human cities torture.
George Gordon Byron
Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside youGliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hoodedI do not know whether a man or a woman-But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S Eliot
So runs my dream, but what am I?An infant crying in the nightAn infant crying for the lightAnd with no language but a cry.
Alfred Tennyson
So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago.
Philip Larkin
If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.
Morrissey
And would it have been worth it, after all,Would it have been worth while,After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more? -
T.S Eliot
I remainMistress of mine own self and mine own soul
Alfred Tennyson
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night.Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,What huge imago madeA psychopathic god:I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in his book,The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again.Into this neutral airWhere blind skyscrapers useTheir full height to proclaimThe strength of Collective Man,Each language pours its vainCompetitive excuse:But who can live for longIn an euphoric dream;Out of the mirror they stare,Imperialism's faceAnd the international wrong.Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are,Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good.The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish:What mad Nijinsky wroteAbout DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart;For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have,Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game:Who can release them now,Who can reach the dead,Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-streetAnd the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky:There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.
W.H. Auden
Morning, noon & bloody night,Seven sodding days a week,I slave at filthy WORK, that mightBe done by any book-drunk freak.This goes on until I kick the bucket.FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT
Philip Larkin
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Virginia Woolf
We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.
W.H. Auden
Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please,With too much spirit to be e'er at ease,With too much quickness ever to be taught,With too much thinking to have common thought:You purchase pain with all that joy can give,And die of nothing but a rage to live.
Alexander Pope
Nature never did betrayThe heart that loved her.
William Wordsworth
Nobody wanted your dance,Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your flounderingDrowning life and your effort to save yourself,Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,Looking for something to give.
Ted Hughes
Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not
John Keats
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.
T.S Eliot
I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.
Jane Austen
Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.
William Blake
I opened a book and in I strode.Now nobody can find me.I've left my chair, my house, my road,My town and my world behind me.I'm wearing the cloak, I've slipped on the ring,I've swallowed the magic potion.I've fought with a dragon, dined with a kingAnd dived in a bottomless ocean.I opened a book and made some friends.I shared their tears and laughterAnd followed their road with its bumps and bendsTo the happily ever after.I finished my book and out I came.The cloak can no longer hide me.My chair and my house are just the same,But I have a book inside me.
Julia Donaldson
A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
What though the radiance which was once so brightBe now for ever taken from my sight,Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength in what remains behind;In the primal sympathyWhich having been must ever be;In the soothing thoughts that springOut of human suffering;In the faith that looks through death,In years that bring the philosophic mind.
William Wordsworth
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
T.S Eliot
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
George Eliot
Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.
Andrew Motion
Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed.
Alfred Tennyson
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheardAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
John Keats
O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude...
George Eliot
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W.H. Auden
Time for you and time for me,tAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions,tAnd for a hundred visions and revisions,tBefore the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
William Blake
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
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
Virginia Woolf
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats
I love the silent hour of night,For blissful dreams may then arise,Revealing to my charmed sightWhat may not bless my waking eyes.
Anne Brontë
Though much is taken, much abides; and thoughWe are not now that strength which in old daysMoved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;One equal temper of heroic hearts,Made weak by time and fate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Tennyson
She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;And all that's best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes...
George Gordon Byron
April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.
T.S Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S Eliot