Quotes by Poets - Page 155

He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.
Jorge Luis Borges
...the clearer the light is, the more it blinds and darkens the pupil of the owl; and the more we look at the sun, the greater is the darkness it causes in our vision ... in the same way, when the divine light of contemplation assails the soul that is not wholly enlightened, it causes spiritual darkness within it.
San Juan de la Cruz
To merely blank the page and vaguely assume that 'religion' is the cause of all the world's problems is, on the contrary, an allegation brought about by nothing more than cognitive lethargy; it is when unburied, unpacked, and exposed but a stale conclusion and a misdirection for the one overwhelmed by centuries of sound theology, scholarly thought, and spiritual development.
Criss Jami
The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately, and no doubt this was so in the ordinary literal sense. But it was certainly expected also in another sense. The converts in all the cities of Asia and (soon) of Europe where the small groups were founded had known, in their conversion, one way or another, a first coming of their Redeemer. And then? And then! That was the consequent task and trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, they communicated and practiced, and waited for his further exhibition of himself. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as catholic — as universal and as durable — as time.
Charles Williams
Herein lies the great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ's weakness equals a supernatural strength.
Christian Wiman
The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately. The converts had known a first coming. And then? And then! That was the trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, they communicated and practiced, and waited. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as universal and as durable — as time.
Charles Williams
Scarlet the poppies Blue the corn-flowers, Golden the wheat. Gold for the Eternal: Blue for Our Lady: Red for the five Wounds of her Son.
Adelaide Crapsey
Reap, reap the grain and gather The sweet grapes from the vine; Our Lord's mother is weeping, She hath nor bread nor wine; She is weeping. The Queen of Heaven, She hath nor bread nor wine.
Adelaide Crapsey
Christ was born of a virgin, that we might be born of God. He took our flesh, that He might give us His Spirit. He lay in the manger that we might lie in paradise. He came down from heaven, that He might bring us to heaven. And what was all this but love? If our hearts be not rocks, this love of Christ should affect us. Behold, love that surpasses knowledge!
Thomas Watson
Have you seena dog lick the hand that thrashed it?!
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Life is a game and you are the player. As you master the game, so you also create it.
Jay Woodman
Control your vibrations and you are the master of your own harmony.
Suzy Kassem
No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one's self
Fernando Pessoa
A mistake made once is an oversight. The same mistake made twice? An abberation. A blunder. But a third time?" Doktor Messerli shook her head. "Whatever's been done has been done to an end. Your will is at work. You beg a result. A repercussion. A precedent has been established. You will get what you want. And there's no need to seek out these mistakes. For now it is they who seek you.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
VITA BREVIS A lifetimeis morethansufficiently longfor people to get what there is of itwrong.
Piet Hein
The first reaction is surely the most natural one, but not always the most correct one; thereupon, the invention of apologies.
Criss Jami
If you realise and accept your mistakes, faults and wrong doings, it is the exact way to recognising, getting and finding yourself, when it happens, you are a genius
Ehsan Sehgal
There is no greater sorrowthan thinking back upon a happy timein misery--
Dante Alighieri
A clever man commits no minor blunders.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sometimes you feel as though you've slandered yourself, but the joke's on them.
Criss Jami
Divinity for the sake of the simple-minded is beautiful. Those theological assertions you write, say, or live by that you later feel foolish about, it means God still lives in you enough to tell you that they were indeed foolish. By mistakes you know you are alive.
Criss Jami
Sometimes the only way to fix a mistake- is to make it twice.
Julianna Baggott
So I went back in time and told her how I liked the smell of soil after the rain. It has a special place in my heart. It reminds me of my childhood days. Days spent in happiness and tranquility.
Avijeet Das
The key of life symbolizes the map of existence. Once you free yourself from all resistance, your path will become white for the remainder of the distance.
Suzy Kassem
Faith is the emperor of dreams.
Suzy Kassem
Today is the day I stand tall, strong, and mighty to tell the world who I am.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
While faith may seem hard to reach sometimes and hope is invisible, that doesn't lessen the power of either of the two...Some of the things that we can't see or physically touch have the strongest power...Hope, faith and love are some of the best tools that we have been given in life.
Ariana R. Cherry
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
Dante Alighieri
Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.
Kevin Powers
From too much liberty, my Lucio, libertyAs surfeit is the father of much fast,So every scope of the immoderate useTurns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, -Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, - A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die.
William Shakespeare
From generation to generation, lights are extinguished and darkness threatens until some one stoops to bear the torch.
Laurence Overmire
Over the course of the millennia, all these multitudes of ancestors, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time—to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind?
Laurence Overmire
Every leader has a right to lead followers in the right direction and the responsibility to empower them to achieve much more.
Gift Gugu Mona
Great leaders do not shift responsibility even if it means acknowledging their own failures.
Gift Gugu Mona
And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.
Catherynne M. Valente
Love is active, not passive. It is our love for one another, for Mother Earth, for our fellow creatures that compels us to act on their behalf.
Laurence Overmire
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.[Henry V, Act IV Scene I]
William Shakespeare
A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth.
Criss Jami
The ArmfulFor every parcel I stoop down to seizeI lose some other off my arms and knees,And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,Extremes too hard to comprehend at. onceYet nothing I should care to leave behind.With all I have to hold with hand and mindAnd heart, if need be, I will do my best.To keep their building balanced at my breast.I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;Then sit down in the middle of them all.I had to drop the armful in the roadAnd try to stack them in a better load.
Robert Frost
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.
D.H. Lawrence
Loneliness is not the perception of leading an isolated life, but it is an inability to get any caring eyes, especially when you want someone to care for you. It is also sense of being lost, even empty you from inside. When you burst into crying, you realise that the whole world is sleeping peacefully with both eyes and ears closed.
Bibhu Datta Rout
I never see the color of a person. I never notice the color of their eyes. But the thing that always gets my attention. Is when the spout out lies
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mindmost of our colors are amazingly the same.
Aberjhani
...and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us; do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
William Shakespeare
Mislike me not for my complexion,The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,To whom I am a neighbor and near bred.Bring me the fairest creature northward born,Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the icicles,And let us make incision for your loveTo prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
William Shakespeare
Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.
Aberjhani
Injustice coupled with racism is a highly explosive mixture, in which the world, threatens to suffocate.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.
Jorge Luis Borges
When I walk in, they may like me or dislike me, but everybody knows I'm here
Maya Angelou
These dreamsThese empty dreamsfrom the make-believe bedroomstheir parents left themare the after-effectsof television programsabout the idealwhite american familywith black maidsand latino janitorswho are well trainto make everyoneand their bill collectorslaugh at themand the people they represent
Pedro Pietri
It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?” “It is.” “Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.
Paul Beatty
This so called 'Home of the Brave'why isn't anybody Backing us up!When they c these crooked ass Redneck copsconstantly Jacking us up
Tupac Shakur
If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks away. You can pick up a pay phone and only hear the dial tone. Shooting stars sound exactly like the soft laughter of a little girl in Gasworks Park. If you kill a white man, the world erupts with noise: fireworks, sirens, a gavel pounding a desk, the slamming of doors.
Sherman Alexie
Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.
Sherman Alexie
They called me an Indian pig. Oh, and they called me a prairie n*****. Pretty colorful, enit?""I suppose.""That one pissed me off, though. I ain't no prairie Indian. I'm from a salmon tribe, man. If they were going to insult me, they should've called me salmon n*****.""I'm surprised you can laugh about this.""It's what Indians do.""Weren't you afraid?""Yeah, I was afraid, but I'm afraid most of the time, you know? How would you feel if a white guy like you got dropped into the middle of a black neighborhood, like Compton, California, on a Saturday night?""I'd be very afraid.""And that's exactly how I feel living in Seattle. Hell, I feel that way living in the United States. Indians are outnumbered, Officer. Those three guys scared me bad, but I've been scared for a long time.
Sherman Alexie
...[E]xcept the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an intermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury... Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realise in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations already mentioned, called the Jews' Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange-an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another. The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited...
Sir Walter Scott
Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.
Maya Angelou
I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.
Sherman Alexie
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Audre Lorde