Quotes by Poets - Page 18

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself I am large I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
If you know nothing be pleased to know nothing.
John Newlove
To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.
Paul Valéry
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us. It wad frae money a blunder free us And foolish notion.
Robert Burns
The happy man is he who knows his limitations yet bows to no false gods.
Robert Service
A show of envy is an insult to oneself.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars But in ourselves that we are underlings.
William Shakespeare
From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it.
Herman Melville
I am as bad as the worst but thank God I am as good as the best.
Walt Whitman
Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Nobody can honestly think of himself as a strong character because however successful he may be in overcoming them he is necessarily aware of the doubts and temptations that accompany every important choice.
W.H. Auden
No man does anything from a single motive.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Every one is bound to bear patiently the results of his own example.
Phaedrus
A sick man that gets talking about himself a woman that gets talking about her baby and an author that begins reading out of his own book never know when to stop.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
George Santayana
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.
William Congreve
We are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger.
William Cowper
If you wish to preserve your secret wrap it up in frankness.
Alexander Smith
Shy and unready men are great betrayers of secrets for there are few wants more urgent for the moment than the want of something to say.
Henry Taylor
Be secret and exult Because of all things known That is most difficult.
William Butler Yeats
I know that's a secret for it's whispered everywhere.
William Congreve
The sea hath no king but God alone.
Christina Rossetti
Then marble soften'd into life grew warm.
Alexander Pope
We search the world for truth we cull The good the pure the beautiful From all old flower fields of the soul And weary seekers of the best We come back laden from our quest To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read.
John Greenleaf Whittier
I must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
John Masefield
Break break break On thy cold gray stones O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
A glory gilds the sacred page Majestic like the sun It gives a light to every age It gives but borrows none.
William Cowper
Give me but one hour of Scotland Let me see it ere I die.
Wiluam E. Aytoun
O Caledonia! stern and wild Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood Land of the mountain and the flood Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand!
Walter Scott
Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
George Santayana
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
Deep-versed in books And shallow in himself.
John Milton
There is a pleasure sure In being mad which none but madmen know!
John Dryden
Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sadness flies away on the wings of time.
Jean de La Fontaine
Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.
Bertolt Brecht
Day of the Lord as all our days should be!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
All roads lead to Rome but our antagonists think we should choose different paths.
Jean de La Fontaine
If you want to be loved be lovable.
Ovid
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
William Shakespeare
Ay every inch a king.
William Shakespeare
The grandeur that was Rome.
Edgar Allan Poe
Go to the ant thou sluggard learn to live and by her busy ways reform thy own.
Elizabeth Smart
Emulation is a noble and just passion full of appreciation.
J. C. F. von Schiller
Imitation is a necessity of human nature.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy.
Oliver Goldsmith
Into the darkness they go the wise and the lovely.
Edna Saint Vincent Millay
There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead where there were no paths.
Dorothy Parker
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Muriel Strode
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Robert Louis Stevenson
For of all sad words of tongues or pen the saddest are these: It might have been.
John Greenleaf Whittier
The soul should always stand ajar ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
Emily Dickinson
Everything is sweetened by risk.
Alexander Smith
And the trouble is if you don't risk anything you risk even more.
Erica Jong
Valour lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.
Miguel de Cervantes
Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks he who fears to encounter the one must not expect to obtain the other
Pietro Metastasio
Fortune and love befriend the bold.
Ovid
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S Eliot