Quotes by Poets - Page 181

The wretch, concentred all in self,Living, shall forfeit fair renown,And, doubly dying, shall go downTo the vile dust, from whence he sprung,Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
Walter Scott
He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz
W.H. Auden
When you fight with God, your warring against your pride.
Anthony Liccione
Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you.All men make mistakes, it is only human.But once the wrong is done, a mancan turn his back on folly, misfortune too,if he tries to make amends, however low he's fallen,and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornnessbrands you for stupidity - pride is a crime.
Sophocles
Neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible except to God alone.
John Milton
If I love a dose of (good) theology or philosophy, I probably also love discipline, improvement, wisdom, and challenges. If I hate it, I am probably too comfortable and proud to try to question myself.
Criss Jami
It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.
Charles Williams
I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!
Thomas Hardy
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny after ward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Many beginners also at times possess great spiritual avarice. They hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish because they don't find the consolation they want in spiritual things. Many never have enough of hearing counsels, or learning spiritual maxims, or keeping them and reading books about them. They spend more time in these than in striving after mortification and the perfection of the interior poverty to which they are obliged.
San Juan de la Cruz
The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more perfection, is the cause of Man's error and misery.
Alexander Pope
The amazing ones are, those that don't know it!
Anthony Liccione
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
Herman Melville
You have seen what Eblis the accursed has seen, when he said "I am of fire, while Adam is of clay."Cover up the Eblis-like eye for just a moment; how long will you see just the form? How long, indeed, how long?Alas for that eye that's blind and bruised! Within it the sun seemed like an atomOf an Adam who had no like. He saw nothing but a lump of
Jalaluddin Rumi
Let us thank God for valour in abstractionFor those who go their own way, will not kissThe arse of law and order nor compoundFor physical comfort at the price of pride
Louis MacNeice
they thought they were heroes when they were only cinders in the eye of humanity too many creatures both insects and humans estimate their own value by the amount of irritation they are able to cause greater personalities than themselves
Don Marquis
God said to him [Eblis], 'You have become proud.' He replied, 'If I had been with you but a moment my pride would have been justified; I have been with you for centuries.
Mansur al-Hallaj
i found god in myself& i loved her/ i loved her fiercely
Ntozake Shange
A fierce hatred of embarrassment ruled a surprising amount of the life of Moses Malone, the Hall of Fame basketball center.
Joseph Bottum
Elsewhere are two letters that were never sent, because of pride, each a declaration of love that would’ve changed lives
Iain S. Thomas
...my pride in Joachim Mahlke was as sweet as chocolate creams.
Günter Grass
. . . I will not be sworn, but love may trans-form me to an oyster, but, I’ll take my oath on it, till hehave made an oyster of me, he shall never make me sucha fool.
William Shakespeare
A day came when all the rebel in me knew itself beaten, and then my whole nature bowed down in humble resignation in the dust. And then I saw... I saw that he was as incomparable in beauty as he was in terror. I was saved, I was rescued.
Rabindranath Tagore
... I deny your right to put words into my mouth.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Pride is not your friend. He would have you think he is, that he affords you strength and courage, but in truth he robs you of your health and by slow, diluted degrees steals your might. He is a crafty and cunning liar who would have you think that stubborn, unapologetic, superior, boastful, and popular are admirable traits. Pride would convince you that being right is more crucial than being kind. He would have you sever relationships, even turn your back on family and friends rather than utter a humble apology. To do so is beneath you, pride would say. He would have you fight like a raptor and gnash your teeth while jutting out an inflexible jaw to defend and protect him, regardless of who is hurt in the process. He would use and demean you in order to puff up and fortify himself. He would destroy your life and every meaningful association before casting you aside without a hint of remorse. Again, Pride is not your friend.
Richelle E. Goodrich
On the Path of the Wise there is probably no danger more deadly, no poison more pernicious, no seduction more subtle than Spiritual Pride; it strikes, being solar, at the very heart of the Aspirant; more, it is an inflation and exacerbation of the Ego, so that its victim runs the peril of straying into a Black Lodge, and finding himself at home there.
Aleister Crowley
There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way.
Robert Penn Warren
America is a young dumb country and it needs all kinds of help. America is a dumb puppy with big teeth that bite and hurt. And we take care of America. We hold America to our bosom; we feed America, we make love to America. There wouldn't be an America if it wasn't for black people. So you have some dedicated black Americans who will die a million deaths to save America. And this is home for us. We don't know really about Africa. We talk it in a romantic sense, but America is it. And so, America is always going to be okay as long as black people don't totally lose their mind, cause we'll pick up the pieces and turn it into a new dance.
Abiodun Oyewole
I had a lot of hatred, but I realized that kind of hate didn't do much. I had to start fueling myself with pride. We owe the ancestors that. So many of the souls who died in bondage just want us to recognize their struggle.
Marilyn Nelson
The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked.
Thomas Moore
We are to give (and take) true love without falling into the narcissistic habit of only trying to take it in.
Criss Jami
He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.
William Shakespeare
A session of boasting won't attract any real friends.  It will set you up on a pedestal, however, making you a clearer target.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.
Kahlil Gibran
And I feel like a real Dad when I read to her at night. She won't sleep without one story, at least.
Steven Herrick
The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
Michel Houellebecq
Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.
Margaret Atwood
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
Barbara Kingsolver
Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
the lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story
David Whyte
It used to be that a novel would put you among people, tell you a story or stories, give you some sense of what it might be like to see a different cut-out and perspective of the world: as a schoolteacher, an adulteress, the wife of a member of Parliament, an officer, a cockroach.
Michael Hofmann
At one point in your life you have to decide whether you want to become a sachem or a solitary.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.
Catherynne M. Valente
The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
As I prefer to see it, there has never been an epic love story that involved significant amounts of self-control.
Jennifer Harrison
As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
This is a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books.
Jonathan Galassi
Each of us is a story, waiting for a devoted reader who will take us off the shelf and embrace all our plot twists.
John Mark Green
She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story.
Catherynne M. Valente
When we all pass from this life and gather on the other side, the only thing each of us will have is his own story to tell.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The story is told of yourself.
Horace
The Heart of Fairyland is a story," she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint.
Catherynne M. Valente
The story of his great-grandfather . . . was his own story, too.
Kelly Cherry
I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.
Kelly Cherry
Every story is us
Jalaluddin Rumi
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
Margaret Atwood
I would like people to remember of me, howinexhaustible was her mindfulness.
Mary Oliver
If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you must look forward, do so prayerfully. However, the wisest thing you can do is be present in the present... gratefully.
Maya Angelou