Quotes by Poets - Page 118

WoyzeckYes, Captain, virtue! That I haven't figured out yet. I'm just a poor guy. The likes of us are wretched in this world and the next. If we ever got to heaven, we'd have to help make the thunder.
Georg Büchner
Remember in any case, that not only the Adept, but anyone with the smallest capacity for Adeptship, is fundamentally an Artist; he will certainly not possess any of those bourgeois "virtues" which are just so many reactions to Blue Funk.
Aleister Crowley
What virtue is it that is born with us?Much less can honor be ascribed thereto,Honor is purchased by the deeds we do.Believe me, Hero, honor is not won,Until some honorable deed be done.----From “Hero and Leander, Sestiad I
Christopher Marlowe
Virtue - to be good and just -Every heart, when sifted well,Is a clot of warmer dust,Mix'd with cunning sparks of hell.- The Vision of Sin
Alfred Tennyson
Cling to the One who clings to nothing;And so clinging, cease to cling.
Thiruvalluvar
Folded hands may conceal a dagger --Likewise a foe's tears.
Thiruvalluvar
The vast world rainless, one may bid adieuTo charity and penance.
Thiruvalluvar
Conquer with forbearanceThe excesses of insolence.
Thiruvalluvar
Virtue alone is happiness; all elseIs else, and without praise.
Thiruvalluvar
Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.
Ben Jonson
Riches, the dumb god that giv'st all men tongues, / That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things; / The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, / Is made worth heaven!
Ben Jonson
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
Herman Melville
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.
Zoë Brigley
Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.
Margaret Atwood
Why mayn't they do what men do?' the Hero cried impetuously. 'I hate that contemptible narrow-mindedness. It's that that makes the ruin and horrors I see. Why mayn't they do what men do? I like the women who are brave enough not to be hypocrites. By Heaven! if these women are bad, I like them better than a set of hypocritical creatures who are all show, and deceive you in the end.
George Meredith
Let us not make a procrustean bed of trans issues and force deities of the past onto it, let us instead awaken trans and other gender-variant deities from their own beds! There is no possibility of blasphemy against existing powers and their human followers if the deities in question are our own, and we never have to "take them back," because they have always been ours to begin with!
P. Sufenas Virius Lupus
Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")
Cameron Awkward-Rich
She follows her nose and stands once more before the doors of a quintessential dilemma. Male or Female. Here is her paradox. A staccato voice seems to challenge her, berate her. Hombre or Mujer. Mann or Frau. Homme or Femme. Gentleman or Lady. Com on, decide. She knows them all. She is them all. Not fluid or all-encompassing, gathering the harvest of the reaping fields, but fractured and split and bleeding. Her inner core weeping out of itself. There is nothing for hermaphrodites. It's too confusing. The words rattle around in her earbones, androgynous and humming. How can she choose? She cannot choose. To choose is to sunder.
Mark O'Flynn
When I was a girlthe books I read were by men.
Sharon Doubiago
Gender and the complications it gives rise to simply aren't relevant to the lives appliances lead.
Thomas M. Disch
Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
W.B. Yeats
Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.In the end they all died.
Elizabeth Smart
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?
W.B. Yeats
Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
Blood cannot be without dancing. There is no dancing without blood.
Cameron Conaway
A man whose eyes love opens risks his soul -His dancing breaks beyond the mind's control.
Farid ud-Din Attar
Against a set of desolate scenery, amid spectral crags and livid mountains of ash, beneath the funereal daylight of slopes illuminated in blue, she personified the spirit of the witches' sabbat. Morbid and voluptuous, sometimes with extenuated grace and infinite lassitude, she seemed to carry the burden of a criminal beauty, a beauty charged with all the sins cf the multitude. She fell again and again upon her pliant legs, and as she outlined the symbolic gestures of her two beautiful dead arms she seemed to be towing them behind her. Then, the vertigo of the abyss took hold of her again, and like one possessed she stood on point, holding herself fully erect from top to toe, like a spike of flesh and shadows. Her arms, weighed down just a few moments earlier, became menacing, demoniac, and audacious. Twisting like a screw, she whirled around, like a winnowing-machine - no, like a great lily stirred by a storm-wind. Clownish and macabre, a nacreous gleam showed between her lips... oh, that cruel and sardonic smile, and the two deep pools of her terrible eyes!Ize Kranile!
Jean Lorrain
You may make love in dancing as well as sitting.
Aphra Behn
This maze is laid out such that should you step through the correct path, by its end you will have learned the most extraordinary dance, such that any coronation would be proud to see you at the height of its feast, such that any holy dervish would weep and call you his devotion.""I think that is very strange—""All things are strange which are worth knowing.
Catherynne M. Valente
Into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The flower is here, so let's dance here.
Amjad Nasser
A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance, because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the spirit set free.
W.B. Yeats
Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.
Jack Kerouac
They dined on mince, and slices of quinceWhich they ate with a runcible spoon;And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,They danced by the light of the moon.
Edward Lear
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music
William Stafford
What sort of life have you ledthat you find yourself, an adult male of late middle age,about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruitsin a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban Grandmawith her sparkly, extravagent eyewear?It's good that your parents are no longer alive.
August Kleinzahler
Do a loony-goony dance 'Cross the kitchen floor, Put something silly in the world That ain't been there before.
Shel Silverstein
Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease.
Criss Jami
Without demolishing religious schools (madrassahs) and minarets and without abandoning the beliefs and ideas of the medieval age, restriction in thoughts and pains in conscience will not end. Without understanding that unbelief is a kind of religion, and that conservative religious belief a kind of disbelief, and without showing tolerance to opposite ideas, one cannot succeed. Those who look for the truth will accomplish the mission.Mevlana Jalal ad-Din RUMI
Jalaluddin Rumi
He had a clear conscience. Never used it.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Always listen to your conscience. If your conscience conflicts with your faith, question everything. You discover your true faith when you start flowing with your conscience. After lessons, visions, and theories validate themselves to you, you begin to build faith in that hypothesis/feeling/idea that originated from your own heart and mind -- not that of others. Before you submit to any one religion, create your own first and then find out which one out there resonates closest with the one already in your heart.
Suzy Kassem
The stomach is the seat of all feeling. The heart is the seat of the conscience. The mind is the seat of the ego. Your body is the seat of the soul. When a man goes out in the night and looks up at the universe, he is observing a mirror of himself. The universe within us, is a reflection of the universe we see out our eyes.
Suzy Kassem
Don't you be worried or annoyed, Sancho, about any comments you hear, or there will never be an end to them. Keep a safe conscience and let people say what they like: trying to still gossips' tongues is like putting up doors in open fields. If the governor leaves office rich they say he's a thief, and if he leaves it poor they say he's a milksop and a fool.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Your burden is not to clear your conscienceBut to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.
T.S Eliot
I am not for the left or the right, but for what is right over the wrong. I am not an elephant or a donkey, but a lion that stands only with Truth and my conscience.
Suzy Kassem
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.
William Shakespeare
Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis.The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand.(it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation...)
Edgar Allan Poe
Wounds sustained for the sake of conscience carry their own balsam with the blow.
Walter Scott
Genius: Range of mind, power of imagination, and responsiveness of soul: this is genius. The man of genius has a soul with greater range, can therefore be struck by the feelings of all beings, is concerned with everything in nature, and never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling. Everything stirs him and everything is retained within him.When the soul has been moved by an object itself, it is even more affected by the memory of the object. But in a man of genius imagination goes further: it recalls ideas with a more vivid feeling than it received them, because to these ideas are connected a thousand others more appropriate to arouse the feeling.
Jean-François de Saint-Lambert
Almost all genius up to now was one-sided—the result of a sickly constitution. One type had too much sense of the external, the other too much inner sense. Seldom could nature achieve a balance between the two—a complete constitution of genius. Often a perfect proportion arose by chance, but this could never endure because it was not comprehended and fixed by the spirit—they remained fortunate moments. The first genius that penetrated itself found here the exemplary germ of an immeasurable world. It made a discovery which must have been the most remarkable in the history of the world—for with it there begins a whole new epoch for humanity—and true history of all kinds becomes possible for the first time at this stage—for the way that had been traversed hitherto now makes up a proper whole that can be entirely elucidated. That point outside the world is given, and now Archimedes can fulfill his promise.
Novalis
A man's genius seems to befriend the more when he reads with open heart, the masterpiece of masterminds, the sagacity of sages, and the ingenious words of geniuses of ages.
Ogwo David Emenike
Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.
Robert Graves
In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Man can never be more perfect than the sun. The sun burns us with the same light that warms us. The sun has spots (stains). The ungrateful only talk about the spots (stains). The grateful talk about the light.
José Martí
Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way.
Charles Bukowski
Genius is nothing more than an extraordinary manifestation of the body.
Arthur Cravan
I wonder if every genius has a touch of madness, does everyone that's normal have a touch or retardation?
Stanley Victor Paskavich
But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]
Michael Ondaatje