Quotes by Poets - Page 115

The poet is rather one who inspires than one inspired.
Paul Éluard
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors… . The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor… . How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.
Walt Whitman
Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
Bertolt Brecht
One day I shall leave the world,And if you feel like remembering me-Search me not in my ashes,In my words, you can rummage me!
Neelam Saxena Chandra
And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.'Is he cursing in rhyme?'He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his curse.'("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")
W.B. Yeats
The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art.
César Vallejo
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
Charles Simic
You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.
James Dickey
Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it
Marianne Moore
Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,and you're hampered by not having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny.No - not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air,you suddenly know what you're hoping.
Piet Hein
If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
Margaret Atwood
So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child. And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child. "It must be a free child," they said to each other. "It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea.
Carl Sandburg
WHAT am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over;t I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.t To you, your name also;t Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?
Walt Whitman
Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly
Pablo Neruda
A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.
Mikhail Lermontov
Evening you gather backall that dazzling dawn has put asunder:you gather a lamb, gather a kid,gather a child to its mother.
Sappho
Cowards excuse themselves by the children. Heroes excuse the children. (Les lâches s'excusent par les enfants. - Les héros excusent les enfants.)
Charles de Leusse
I know what it is: it's a green mamba snake away up in the tree. You don't have to be afraid of them anymore because you are one. They lie so still on the tree branch; they are the same everything as the tree. You could be right next to one and not even know. It's so quiet there. That's just exactly what I want to go and be, when I have to disappear. Your eyes will be little and round but you are so far up there you can look down and see the whole world, Mama and everybody. The tribes of Ham, Shem, and Japheth all together. Finally you are the highest one of all.
Barbara Kingsolver
Sometimes she walks through the village in herlittle red dressall absorbed in restraining herself,and yet, despite herself, she seems to moveaccording to the rhythm of her life to come.She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,half-turns around...and, all while dreaming, shakes her headfor or against.Then she dances a few stepsthat she invents and forgets,no doubt finding out that lifemoves on too fast.It's not so much that she steps outof the small body enclosing her,but that all she carries in herselffrolics and ferments.It's this dress that she'll rememberlater in a sweet surrender;when her whole life is full of risks,the little red dress will always seem right.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When you discipline a child you prepare them for a responsible and accountable adulthood.
Gugu Mona
If you ever want to remember anything, tell it to a child.
Charmaine J.Forde
Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.
Gabriela Mistral
Oh, the joy of the arrival of a child, which is both the one and the other, a mirror in which husband and wife, who love each other, can see each other in one single face.
Georges Rodenbach
I went over to see Marina two or three or four times a week. I knew as long as I could see the girl I would be all right…. Soon after, I got a letter from Fay. She and the child were living in a hippie commune in New Mexico. It was a nice place, she said. Marina would be able to breathe there. She enclosed a little drawing the girl had made for me.
Charles Bukowski
The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.
Erica Jong
Rendall's first law of jealousy: jealousy does the cock harder and pussy wetter.
Erica Jong
I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance!
Christopher Marlowe
Expect while reaching for the stars, people to whirl by with their dark clouds and storm upon you.
Anthony Liccione
Jealousy devours us, we are its dish of the day. (Jalousie nous dévore. - Nous sommes son plat du jour)
Charles de Leusse
She's just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it's not, it's the worst, it's the worst feeling there is - incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like a view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness.
Margaret Atwood
Jealousy is like wood ants, it will nibble away, until there's nothing left.
Charmaine J.Forde
Stay away to abuse and misemploy knowledge, and neutrality with jealousy since it reflects the lack of sense.
Ehsan Sehgal
The jealousy holds neither the colours and nor the places. It is voiceless and timeless a time bomb within you to blow up only you, not others.
Ehsan Sehgal
Love has its own dark morality when rivalry enters in.
Thomas Hardy
We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
Margaret Atwood
Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it, For jealousy dislikes the world to know it.
George Gordon Byron
Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.
William Shakespeare
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mockThe meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o'erWho dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!(Act 3, scene 3, 165–171)
William Shakespeare
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
Margaret Atwood
If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.
William Shakespeare
Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.
Pablo Neruda
Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.
Robert Louis Stevenson
We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.
Rosario Castellanos
Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
Langston Hughes
And then he began to laugh in a peculiar way of his own which was both violent and soundless. His heavy reclining body, draped in its black gown, heaved to and fro. His knees drew themselves up to his chin. His arms dangled over the sides of the chair and were helpless. His head rolled from side to side. It was as though he were in the last stages of strychnine poisoning. But no sound came, nor did his mouth even open. Gradually the spasm grew weaker, and when the natural sand colour of his face had returned (for his corked-up laughter had turned it dark red) he began his smoking again in earnest.
Mervyn Peake
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor...When I say this, it should mean laughter,not poison.
Richard Siken
And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision.
Erica Jong
I ask for a decreedooming my bitter enemies to laughteradvanced against them.
John Berryman
I know, you were much closer to the painter than any of us. In spite of that, your lips, too, will want to curl up into a smile. There are levels of tragedy whose mind-numbing properties can only be checked by laughter, and what story does not contain an inkling of the grotesque? When we Germans will have learnt to laugh like the Gauls, we will truly be the rulers of this earth; even more so than before, one might add.""John Hamilton Llewellyn's End
Hanns Heinz Ewers
Laughter's all the damned thing's fit for.
Henrik Ibsen
All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.
Thomas Hardy
The Universe will give us love, happiness, merriment and laughter if we give others love, happiness, merriment and laughter!
Avijeet Das
And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.
Jack Kerouac
Lucian [of Samosata; 120-190 CE] was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Laughing like crazythe child goes back to the citygives birth to monsterscreates earthquakeshairy women run nakedold folks who look like fetuses laugh and smoke.
Nicanor Parra
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.
W.H. Auden
The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.
Friedrich Schiller