Quotes by Poets - Page 132

I'm beginning to think information is our addictive madness.
Goenawan Mohamad
For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death.
Hermann Hesse
But only in mad people fear goes on constant night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all thoughts must travel in.
Josephine Winslow Johnson
The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.
Gérard de Nerval
There is a madness in me that does not follow society.
Avijeet Das
In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
Charles Mackay
Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and the ignorance of the future..
Charles Mackay
Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.
Floriano Martins
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,Shakes so my single state of manThat function is smothered in surmise,And nothing is but what is not.
William Shakespeare
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.
Charles Mackay
I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.
Charles Baudelaire
Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?
Fernando Pessoa
Great wits are to madness near alliedAnd thin partitions do their bounds divide.
John Dryden
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
Herman Melville
He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace
Mikhail Lermontov
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
William Shakespeare
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
George Santayana
Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.
Randall Jarrell
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
On the way of perfection; often, there are healing steps into the void.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself.
Hermann Hesse
You are perfect and have no synonym
John J. Geddes
Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.
Thomas Moore
Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it
Margaret Atwood
We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
Stanley Kunitz
Do it again.Play it again. Sing it again. Read it again. Write it again. Sketch it again. Rehearse it again. Run it again. Try it
Richelle E. Goodrich
You know if the U.S. Government wanted to boost the economy there's a simple solution make Black Friday the refund date for your state and federal taxes
Stanley Victor Paskavich
A magic came out of your smileGold thread of gold threadStars illuminating the skyThereWhere in the mountain streamHealing waterTears of ice as a gift to me
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the houseNot a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;The children were nestled all snug in their beds;While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.Away to the window I flew like a flash,Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,When what to my wondering eyes did appear,But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,With a little old driver so lively and quick,I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blixen!To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;So up to the housetop the coursers they flewWith the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too—And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roofThe prancing and pawing of each little hoof.As I drew in my head, and was turning around,Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow;The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;He had a broad face and a little round bellyThat shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;A wink of his eye and a twist of his headSoon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,And laying his finger aside of his nose,And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
Clement C. Moore
Another Christmas PoemBlood Christmas, here again.Let us raise a loving cup:Peace on earth, goodwill to men,And make them do the washing-up.
Wendy Cope
At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.
Herman Melville
Christmas comes but once a year, starts in August ends in July
Benny Bellamacina
But Time and Tide and Buttered Eggs wait for no man.
John Masefield
Christmas Eve, I give him packages which I open for him, since the bows and paper represent more labor than he could manage: music videos by the Nashville singers he thinks particularly sexy, fleece-lined slippers decorated with images of bacon and eggs, and a book about breeds of dogs. He says he wishes he had something for me to open, but I don’t want anything except to have him here. There’s nothing more he could give me than his life, right now, his being with me.
Mark Doty
8. Santa Claus is concerned about the problem of Arctic ice. The ice is the spouse of the elves, and she is sick. She is the primary source of their magic, as the elves cannot be separated from the place where they live. For many years now, this is all they have asked for for Christmas: that the ice should come back
Catherynne M. Valente
It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.
Dylan Thomas
Oh! lovely voices of the skyWhich hymned the Saviour's birth,Are ye not singing still on high,Ye that sang, "Peace on earth"?
Felicia Hemans
Christmas ought to be brought up to date,” Maria said. “It ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes and a lot of automatic pistols.
John Masefield
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
Without the door let sorrow lie,And if for cold it hap to die,We'll bury 't in a Christmas pie,And evermore be merry.
George Wither
At Christmas play and make good cheer, For Christmas comes but once a year.
Thomas Tusser
Except the Christ be born again tonightIn dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame,The world will never see his kingdom bright.
Vachel Lindsay
Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each person is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Bethlehem would probably have sprung for a box of After Eights. Three Magi on the same trip found themselves laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh and bitterly comtemplating their overdrafts.
James Hamilton-Paterson
A Christmas gambol oft could cheerThe poor man's heart through half the year.
Walter Scott
Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven's making.
Leigh Hunt
I manage a toast to the Christmas treeand one to the sweet absurdityin the miracle of the verb to be.Lucky you, lucky me.
Miller Williams
O Christmas Sun! What holy task is thine!To fold a world in the embrace of God!
Guy Wetmore Carryl
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
Barbara Kingsolver
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
W.H. Auden
At ChristmasA man is at his finest towards the finish of the year;He is almost what he should be when the Christmas season's here;Then he's thinking more of others than he's thought the months before,And the laughter of his children is a joy worth toiling for.He is less a selfish creature than at any other time;When the Christmas spirit rules him he comes close to the sublime.
Edgar A. Guest
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.
Sylvia Plath
Peace on earth will come to stay, When we live Christmas every day.
Helen Steiner Rice
I heard the bells on Christmas DayTheir old, familiar carols play,And wild and sweetThe words repeatOf peace on earth, good-will to men!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The greatest war every fought, and are still fighting, where more people have been defeated and died, is the war within.
Anthony Liccione
The best way to compete is to get defeat.
Santosh Kalwar
They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;
Robert Louis Stevenson
Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Margaret Atwood
God willing, we shall this day meet that old enemyWho has give us so many a good beating.Thank God we have a cause worth fighting for,And a cause worth losing and a good song to sing.
John Gould Fletcher
You're fighting this war in the worst way possible." "I don't know how to fight it, Dad.""You should ask for help," he said."I don't know how to do that, either.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz