Quotes by Poets - Page 183

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
Rabindranath Tagore
My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?
Arthur Rimbaud
the much-sought prize of eternal youthIs just arrested growth.
Edgar Lee Masters
No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.
Knut Hamsun
She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.
Barbara Kingsolver
I didn’t know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of youth.
Roman Payne
He seems, in manner and rank, above the class of young men who take that turn; but I remember hearing them say, that the little theatre at Fairport was to open with the performance of a young gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.—If this should be thee, Lovel!—Lovel? yes, Lovel or Belville are just the names which youngsters are apt to assume on such occasions—on my life, I am sorry for the lad.
Walter Scott
Orsino: For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,Than women's are. ...For women are as roses, whose fair flow'rBeing once display'd doth fall that very hour.Viola: And so they are; alas, that they are so!To die, even when they to perfection grow!
William Shakespeare
Now that lilacs are in bloomShe has a bowl of lilacs in her roomAnd twists one in her fingers while she talks."Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not knowWhat life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks)"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,And youth is cruel, and has no remorseAnd smiles at situations which it cannot see."I smile, of course,And go on drinking tea.
T.S Eliot
such wanton, wild, and usual slips/ As are companions noted and most known/ To youth and liberty.
William Shakespeare
It was a strange business and it made a sad and curious impression on me; everything that had belonged to me in these earlier years of my life left me, was alien and lost to me. I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.
Hermann Hesse
Westward on the high-hilled plainsWhere for me the world began, Still, I think, in newer veinsFrets the changeless blood of man....There, when hueless is the westAnd the darkness hushes wide,Where the lad lies down to restStands the troubled dream beside.There, on thoughts that once were mine,Day looks down the eastern steep,And the youth at morning shineMakes the vow he will not keep.
A.E. Housman
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow
William Shakespeare
The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.
Margaret Atwood
Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.
Rainer Maria Rilke
All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.
Siegfried Sassoon
O you youths, Western youths,So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,Pioneers! O pioneers!
Walt Whitman
I was tired of her getting away with being so young.
Margaret Atwood
Only youth has a taste of immortality.
D.H. Lawrence
And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't.
D.H. Lawrence
More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.
Robert Frost
Oh how can we, scarce mastering our passions, expect that youth should keep itself in check?
Friedrich Schiller
Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools.
George Chapman
Youth must triumph... now. Afterwards, it will be life.
Jose Garcia Villa
CLEOPATRA: My salad days,When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,To say as I said then! But, come, away;Get me ink and paper:He shall have every day a several greeting,Or I'll unpeople Egypt.
William Shakespeare
...the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth.
Hermann Hesse
The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.
Siegfried Sassoon
Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of.
Hermann Hesse
It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.
Roman Payne
We know from several statements of Knecht's that he wanted to write the former Master's biography, but official duties left him no time for such a task. He had learned to curb his own wishes. Once he remarked to one of his tutors: "It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious–but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classrooms, Archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys–if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.
Hermann Hesse
But flaming youth in all it's madnessKeeps nothing of its heart concealed:It's loves and hates, its joys and sadness,Are babbled out and soon revealed.
Alexander Pushkin
In the morning After taking cold shower —-what a mistake—- I look at the mirror.There, a funny guy, Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin, —-what a pity—- Poor, dirty, old man, He is not me, absolutely not.Land and life Fishing in the ocean Sleeping in the desert with stars Building a shelter in the mountains Farming the ancient way Singing with coyotes Singing against nuclear war— I’ll never be tired of life. Now I’m seventeen years old, Very charming young man.I sit quietly in lotus position, Meditating, meditating for nothing. Suddenly a voice comes to me: “To stay young, To save the world, Break the mirror.
Nanao Sakaki
No one's serious at seventeen,When lindens line the promenades
Arthur Rimbaud
The Old Woman asked, "Here you are, dear Youth, you are looking at the Garden and do not know that it is an evil Garden. Here you are waiting for the Beautiful Woman and do not know that her beauty is destructive. You have been living in my room for two years and never before have you become so engrossed as you have today. Apparently your turn has come too. Go away from the window before it is too late, do not breathe the evil fragrance of these deceitful flowers and do not wait for the Beautiful Woman to appear below your window and enchant you. She will come, she will enchant you, and you will follow her against your will.Speaking thus, the Old Woman lit two candles on the table where some books were lying, banged the window shut and drew the curtain tightly across the window. The curtain rings scraped lightly along the bronze curtain rod, and the yellow linen of the curtain fluttered and once again lay motionless — and the room became cheerful, comfortable and peaceful. And it seemed that there was no longer any garden beyond the window, nor was there any sorcery in the world, and everything was simple, ordinary, and would remain so once and for all.("The Poison Garden")
Valery Bryusov
I had forgotten such innocence exists,/forgotten how it feels/ to live with neither calendars nor clocks
P.K. Page
He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.("The Poison Garden")
Valery Bryusov
During my completely soul-shredding midlife crisis at the age of twenty-eight, I felt sure I had peaked too soon.
Jennifer Harrison
Golden lads and girls all must, like chimmney-sweepers, come to dust.
William Shakespeare
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I do not dye my hair blackso as to be young again and sin againbut because people dye their clothes black in mourning,so I have dyed my hair black, mourning for my old age.
Rūdagī
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one;Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
W.B. Yeats
I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find
W.B. Yeats
I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.
Siegfried Sassoon
I rather would entreat thy companyTo see the wonders of the world abroadThan, living dully sluggardiz'd at home,Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.
William Shakespeare
You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse
Jack Kerouac
In those days I coercedOracular assuranceIn my favour out of every sign.
Ted Hughes
There was an old belief that in the embersOf all things their primordial form exists, And cunning alchemistsCould re-create the rose with all its membersFrom its own ashes, but without the bloom, Without the lost perfume Ah me! what wonder-working, occult scienceCan from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore?What craft of alchemy can bid defianceTo time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Young hearts have their unfathomable depths.
Knut Hamsun
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too lateTill the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.Cato learned Greek at eighty; SophoclesWrote his grand Oedipus, and SimonidesBore off the prize of verse from his compeers,When each had numbered more than fourscore years,And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,Had but begun his Characters of Men.Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,Completed Faust when eighty years were past,These are indeed exceptions; but they showHow far the gulf-stream of our youth may flowInto the arctic regions of our lives.Where little else than life itself survives.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
But here we call it Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns,fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,to touching in the dark. And the old man's?To worms in their garden box; stepping asidea moment in a poem that will remember,fitfully, who made it and the discordand stammer, and change of heart and catch of breathit sprang from. A bending downlightly to touch the earth.
David Malouf
My freshness is spending its wavering shower in the dust.
Francis Thompson
So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire.
D.H. Lawrence
We’d like to think that our youth was madder, brighter, happier than it was. It comforts us as we grow older, to believe that once upon a time we danced at dawn in a fountain.
Robert Nathan
Love is for every age auspicious,But for the virginal and youngIts impulses are more propitiousLike vernal storms on meadows sprung:They freshen in the rain of passion,Ripening in their renovation –And life, empowered, sends up shootsOf richest blooms and sweetest fruits.But at a late age, dry and fruitless,The final stage to which we’re led,Sad is the trace of passions dead:Thus storms in autumn, cold and ruthless,Transform the field into a slough,And strip the trees from root to bough.
Alexander Pushkin
How sad, however, if we're givenOur youth as something to betray,And what if youth in turn is drivenTo cheat on us, each hour, each day,If our most precious aspirations,Our freshest dreams, imaginationsIn fast succession have decayed,As leaves, in putrid autumn, fade.It is too much to see before oneNothing but dinners in a row,Behind the seemly crowd to go,Regarding life as mere decorum,Having no common views to share,Nor passions that one might declare.
Alexander Pushkin
The noontide of my life is starting,Which I must needs accept, I know;But oh, my light youth, if we're parting,I want you as a friend to go!My thanks to you for the enjoyments,The sadness and the pleasant torments,The hubbub, storms, festivity,For all that you have given me;My thanks to you. I have delightedIn you when times were turbulent,When times were calm... to full extent;Enough now! With a soul clear-sightedI set out on another questAnd from my old life take a rest.Let me glance back. Farewell, you arboursWhere, in the backwoods, I recallDays filled with indolence and ardoursAnd dreaming of a pensive soul.And you, my youthful inspiration,Keep stirring my imagination,My heart's inertia vivify,More often to my corner fly.Let not a poet's soul be frozen,Made rough and hard, reduced to boneAnd finally be turned to stoneIn that benumbing world he goes in,In that intoxicating sloughWhere, friends, we bathe together now.
Alexander Pushkin
The splendor of youth is, to a point, the splendor of error. Jealous the old, who have everything previewed! The nightingale will never come sing over your wisdom. It won’t, darlin’, it won’t.
Odysseus Elytis
Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That’s progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers.
Odysseus Elytis
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn.
Rainer Maria Rilke