Quotes by Poets - Page 136

Danger, the spur of all great minds.
George Chapman
Folks in Irihs might not be as welcoming as they were here. Resentment lingers.''So we're going to be in danger.''No more than any other day of your life.
Ashley Capes
The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders,But I am no wolf by blood.
Osip Mandelstam
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach that, however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
Herman Melville
All these pricks gathering around her body, trying to reach and pierce her rose.
Anthony Liccione
Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.
Jorie Graham
Do not keep the slanderer away,treat him with affection and honor:Body and soul, he scours all clean,babbling about this and that.
Kabir
Her body begs to be taken away and put into a warm bed with the sheets pulled high, even though nothing can help now.
Steven Herrick
Your body is the house you grew up in. How dare you try to burn it to the ground.
Sierra DeMulder
Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.
Barbara Kingsolver
Once I could imagine my soulI could imagine my death.When I imagined my deathmy soul died. ThisI remember clearly.My body persisted.Not thrived, but persisted.Why I do not know.
Louise Glück
My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.
Ben Lerner
If Cupid misses the heart, he touches the body fatally. (Si Cupidon rate le cœur, - Il touche mortellement le corps)
Charles de Leusse
A glass of happiness fills whole body. (Un verre de bonheur - Remplit tout le corps)
Charles de Leusse
Body is morning dew that shines to the rise of the hands. (Corps est rosée du matin - Qui brille au lever des mains.)
Charles de Leusse
I can’t relate to your razzle-dazzle, your wish for voluptuous when my symphony is spanx.
Kelli Russell Agodon
I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won't fillme now. Your attention is a fish-head,so throw it back into my new body, backinto the body climbing the stairs.
Patricia Lockwood
None of us understood that the body is a connected thing.
Lucy Grealy
The body is a clothing that suits us for life. (Le corps est un habit - Qui nous va à vie.)
Charles de Leusse
We have a fractured understanding of how the body exists in physical space and also a deeper internal sense of the body and its purposes. We are, in a way, disconnected from equations of reproduction, or our sexuality has evolutionarily been tilted in a different direction. It begs the scientific question: to what purpose? It doesn’t feel accidental to me that throughout history queer people have been magical, holy, and artistic.
Kazim Ali
This is a case without a body.The body does not come into it at all.
Sylvia Plath
After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.
Margaret Atwood
I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.
Jorge Luis Borges
A Wyvern’s body is different from the body of a young girl in several major respects. First, it has wings, which most young girls do not (there are exceptions). Second, it has a very long, thick tail, which some young girls may have, but those who find themselves so lucky keep them well hidden. Let us just say, there is a reason some ladies wore bustles in times gone by! Third, it weighs about as much as a tugboat carrying several horses and at least one boulder. There are girls who weigh that much, but as a rule, they are likely to be frost giants. Do not trouble such folk with asking after the time or why their shoes do not fit so well.
Catherynne M. Valente
There's water in my bonesa ghost of a chance
Michael Ondaatje
remind that boy your body is not his home he is a guest warn him to never outstep his welcome again
Rupi Kaur
and today,your bonesgathered your skinand said'Come on, let's do it again
Upile Chisala
Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?
Mary Oliver
I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did. Maybe that's just the way it was.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The moment you feel you have to prove your worth to someone is the moment to absolutely and utterly walk away.
Alysia Harris
Presumptuous Man! the reason wouldst thou find,Why form'd so weak, so little, and so blind?First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,Why form'd no weaker, blinder, and no less!Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are madeTaller or stronger than the weeds they shade?Or ask of yonder argent fields above,Why Jove's Satellites are less than Jove?
Alexander Pope
It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.
Edgar Allan Poe
Had mankind listened to the Creator when he advised his children to never create his image, or give him a name, then humanity would not be so confused and divided in believing that every faith is worshiping a different god.
Suzy Kassem
MankindMen, said the Devil,are good to their brothers:they don’t want to mendtheir own ways, but each other's.
Piet Hein
Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are the most apt to get out of order.
Herman Melville
... when I see kings lying by those who deposed them,... or holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.
Joseph Addison
TO ALL MANKINDSpeak kind wordsto mankindand the unkindwill attack you.Speak common senseusing any of your senses,and you will be attacked bythe senseless.Speak truth,and you will be attacked bythe untruthful.Speak about absolutely nothing,and absolutely nothingwill speak back,but then nothing at allwill ever change.
Suzy Kassem
Come, let me know whether thou art acreature of good or not.' And he replied: `I am a man.
Chrétien de Troyes
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
It did not occur to Adya that like being competitive during exam times, while being competitive in matters of life also the boys would actually tend to ditch their female counterparts in little little matters and get things their way.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
Iniquity it is; but pass the can.tMy lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;Our only portion is the estate of man:tWe want the moon, but we shall get no more. (Last Poems, IX)
A.E. Housman
Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise.
Rémy de Gourmont
He'd have improved if you'd not givenHim a mere glimmer of the light in heaven;He calls it Reason, and it has only increasedHis power to be beastlier than a beast.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The chaos on our planet, the plundering of resources, and the division of humanity are not the true works of any kind of man. They are the work of those who conquer over man.
Suzy Kassem
The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
W.H. Auden
No man is an island, entire of itself.
John Donne
I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance
Alfred de Vigny
Everything is boring, boredom is the other epidemic which is making Europe ripe for decline. Boredom is the end product of each and every civilization. It is the arteriosclerosis of the great thinking peoples. The moment always arrives where even God, whether he’s called Zeus, Zebaoth or Zoroaster, has finished creating the universe and asks: “What’s the point of it, actually?” He yawns and chucks it aside. Mankind does the same with civilization. Boredom is the condition of a people which no longer believes but all the same is doing just fine. Boredom is when every clock in the country is predestined to be correct. When the same naive flowers blossom again in the month of March. When every day the deaths of good family fathers are announced in the papers. When a war breaks out in the Balkans. When poems go on about the stars. Boredom is a symptom of aging. Boredom is the diagnosis that talent and virtue are slowly being spent. Boredom is the life-long determination to a form of being which has worn itself out.
Iwan Goll
Shall we their fond pageant see?Lord, what fools these mortals be!
William Shakespeare
Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.
Sherman Alexie
A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.
Roman Payne
But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.
Barbara Kingsolver
Your Heart, Your Mind, Your Creator! Your Soul Will Follow.
Richard M. Knittle Jr.
No guile? Nay, but so strangely He moves among us. . Not this Man but Barabbas! Release to us Barabbas!
Adelaide Crapsey
The fans are always more radical than that which they are fans.
Criss Jami
As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.
Patricia Lockwood
That when we live no more, We may live ever
Anne Bradstreet
The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.
Jorge Luis Borges
Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.
Margaret Atwood