Quotes by Philosophers - Page 330

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and handand asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere isholy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's anangel!
Allen Ginsberg
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.
Aldous Huxley
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I knew what to doI'd do more than write a song for you
Criss Jami
As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.
Albert Camus
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul.
Søren Kierkegaard
You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it
Criss Jami
one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others
Allen Ginsberg
A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I fall asleepCall it deep while all is well be-Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean-While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and nowThe symphony's soundingShouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loudBut howI'm allowed to live my dreamsMy Chimeran team brings the Siberian breedRiding reality free 'til these tires they freezeIn mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat butI love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze
Criss Jami
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Freedom is the dream you dreamWhile putting thought in chains again --
Giacomo Leopardi
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
Paul Valéry
Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.
Aldous Huxley
Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
Aldous Huxley
From love's plectrum arisesthe song of the string of lifeLove is the light of lifelove is the fire of life
Muhammad Iqbal
Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To be loved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Language is fossil Poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
William H. Gass
We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
George Steiner
Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.
Gaston Bachelard
The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
Then all the charm Is broken--all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.
Criss Jami
Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
Michael Oakeshott
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
Voltaire
Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
G.K. Chesterton
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must listen to poets.
Gaston Bachelard
The new world is as yetbehind the veil of destinyIn my eyes, howeverits dawn has been unveiled
Muhammad Iqbal
Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life
Hélène Cixous
The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. Gass
There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.
Plato
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
Richard M. Rorty
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.
George Santayana
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
For our generation walks as in Hades, without the divine.
Friedrich Hölderlin
Oh I know it's cliché but yeah they say that great men make it in-To places few others who even do take the risk've ever been
Criss Jami
A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.
Thomas Aquinas
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire
Songwriting and poetry are so commonly birthed from underdogs because one can make even the ugliest situations admirable, or more beautiful than the beautiful situations - they are the most graceful media in which the lines of society are distorted.
Criss Jami
The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every word was once a poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
Umberto Eco
Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
Paul Valéry
A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick. If, when you see the symptoms, you can tell, Your cure is quick.A sound man knows that sickness makes him sick and before he catches it his cure is quick.
Lao Tzu