Quotes by Poets - Page 163

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Anne Michaels
The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
André Breton
Underground, the stars are legend.
Catherine Fisher
TreeIt is foolishto let a young redwoodgrow next to a house.Even in this one lifetime,you will have to choose.That great calm being,this clutter of soup pots and books--Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Jane Hirshfield
Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?""Yes.""All like ours?""I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted.""Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?""A blighted one.
Thomas Hardy
Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi')
Dōgen
My religion is to live - and die - without regret.
Milarepa
I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,' then I run on, say to 'David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha' though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words 'equally a coming Buddha' I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think 'equally a coming Buddha' you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes.
Jack Kerouac
A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.
Dōgen
Dream: I look for  Lama Lodrö Kagyu  teacher friend  hearing he's ill & I'm ill, too -  I enter his room and he says "I've been trying to find you - I wanted you  to know illness is just phenomena
Marc Olmsted
Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.
Roger Zelazny
Karma means ‘action’. Like many, you misunderstand its nature. Past misdeeds can be corrected before your karma ripens: it is not some pre-determined fate. It is what you do now that counts.
John Dolan
Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude.
John Dolan
You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous anchor that tethers you to the past. Until you can burn it away, you can never truly live in the present, in the now. Until you can live in the now, you cannot see things as they really are. Meantime you are a man who is wilfully blind. You have eyes and yet you will not use them.
John Dolan
Intruding upon a dimension rightfully ours, modern medicine robs us of the dignity of what people in the past regarded as most precious: that final moment of death.
Shinmon Aoki
When you die, you want to die a beautiful death. But what makes for a beautiful death is not always clear. To die without suffering, to die without causing trouble to others, to die leaving behind a beautiful corpse, to die looking good -- it's not clear what is meant by a beautiful death. Does a beautiful death refer to the way you die or the condition of your corpse after death? This distinction is not clear. And when you start to stretch the image of death to the method of how to dispose of your corpse as befitting your image of death, everything grows completely out of hand.
Shinmon Aoki
A maggot is just another life form.
Shinmon Aoki
Within my body are all the sacred places of the world and the most profound pilgrimage that I can ever make is within my own body.
Saraha
Returning to whereIt used to see blossoms,My mind, changed,Will stay on at Yoshino...Home now, and see anew.
Saigyō
Beyond this life andThis world I'll have it tilMy heart's content:The bright moon that passed overThe horizon before I had my fill.
Saigyō
Last year, Yoshino,I walked away bending branchesTo point me to blossoms--Which now are everywhere and I canGo where I've never been before.
Saigyō
Merchant: 'So you have lived on the possessions of others?'Saddhartha: 'Apparently. The merchant also lives on the possession of others.'Merchant: 'Well spoken...
Hermann Hesse
And so Gotama wandered into the town to obtain alms, and the two Samanas recognized him only by his complete peacefulness of demeanor, by the stillness of his form, in which there was no seeking, no will, no counterfeit, no effort - only light and peace.
Hermann Hesse
Children I implore youget out of the burning house nowthree carts wait outsideto save you from a homeless liferelax in the village squarebefore the sky everything's emptyno direction is better or worseeast is just as good as westthose who know the meaning of thisare free to go where they want
Han-shan
Now seen...now gone,The butterfly flits in and outThrough fence-hung flowers;But a life lived so close to themI envy...though it's here and gone.
Saigyō
Today's satori:Such a change of mind wouldNot exist withoutMy lifelong habit of havingMy mind immersed in blossoms.
Saigyō
I'd like to dividemyself in order to see,among these mountains,each and every flowerof every cherry tree.
Saigyō
Limitations gone:Since my mind fixed on the moon,Clarity and serenityMake something for whichThere's no end in sight.
Saigyō
Tightly held by rocksThrough winter, the ice todayBegins to come undone:A way-seeker also is the water,Melting, murmuring from the moss.
Saigyō
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.
Hermann Hesse
O snailClimb Mount FujiBut slowly, slowly!
Kobayashi Issa
Where there are humans, You'll find flies,And Buddhas.
Kobayashi Issa
...for you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than force." Vesadeva to Siddartha
Hermann Hesse
Smile, my beloved, like the gold smiles from my father's coffers.
Kahlil Gibran
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
Hermann Hesse
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in. A minute to smile and an hour to weep in. A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, And never a laugh but the moans come double. And that is life. A crust and a corner that makes love precious, With a smile to warm and tears to refresh us, And joy seems sweeter when cares come after, And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter. And that is life.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
I often wonder, if those that smile the most, are the most saddest people in the world.
Anthony Liccione
I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.
Edgar Allan Poe
The surplus of the heart overflows from a smile. (Le surplus du coeur - Déborde d'un sourire)
Charles de Leusse
The flower that does not smileat the branches withers.
Jalaluddin Rumi
There is no faith in the smile of the rose
Hafiz of Shiraz
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing.
Thomas Hardy
Some words were left unsaid Oh Layla, as you slept peacefully in my arms, and the stars kept on peeping into the room to glance at your smile!
Avijeet Das
Some days I’mtrying to forcea smile sohard it feelslike I mightshit my pants
Phil Volatile
Smile fragrances one's reflection of the inner, which inspires others pleasure feeling.
Ehsan Sehgal
A smile is the universal welcome.
Max Eastman
And tonight the stars again ask me your name?And I just smile, playing the guessing game!
Avijeet Das
The way you dress is how you greet the sun and other stars.
Kamand Kojouri
I have reached this destinationAfter walking through miles and miles;See also my bruised feet,Don’t always go after my smiles…
Neelam Saxena Chandra
The prospect Smiler was a manic farmer. Few men I think can have been as unfortunate as he; for on the one hand he was a melancholic with a loathing for mankind, on the other, some paralysis had twisted his mouth into a permanent and radiant smile. So everyone he met, being warmed by his smile, would shout him a happy greeting. And beaming upon them with his sunny face he would curse them all to hell.
Laurie Lee
The smile is civilization’s finest adornment. It signifies the willpower and duty to fashion mankind’s coexistence as quietly and agreeably as possible so that it will always appear friendly. For it is all a matter of appearance. The smile is culture’s diploma: it is the diplomat’s badge.
Iwan Goll
The Sage's Wish: Like Sun, from the East, may you continue to rise, smile and shine.
Ogwo David Emenike
Teeth aren't pearly, until you smile.
Anthony Liccione
I would rather wear honest tears than the most beautiful and elaborately faked smile.
Tyler Knott Gregson
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
Jean Genet
There is thin line between smile and laughter.
Santosh Kalwar
We divided ourselves among caste, creed, culture and countries but what is undivided remains most valuable: a mere smile and the love.
Santosh Kalwar
If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.
Maya Angelou
For the Wife Beater's WifeWith blue irises her face is blossomed. BlueCircling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks.The long bone of her jaw untrackedShe hides in our kitchen.He sleeps it off next door.Her chicken legs tucked under herShe's frantic with lies, animatedBefore the swirling smoke.On her cigarette she leaves red prints, redLike a cut on the white cup.Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her.She's cold,She brings the cold in with her.In our kitchen she hides.He sleeps it off next door, his greatBelly heaving with booze.Again and again she tells the storyAs if the details ever changed,As if blows to the face were somehowDifferent beating to beating.We reach for her but can't help.She retreats into her cold love of himAnd looks across the table at usAs if across a sea.Next door he claws out of sleep.She says she thinks she'll do somethingAfter all, with her hair tonight.
Bruce Weigl
Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.
Aberjhani