Quotes by Poets - Page 199

Those who are critical don’t like being criticized, and those who are insensitive have a deficiency in their senses.
Suzy Kassem
One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T.S Eliot
A writer observes. A writer records for posterity. The moments in the transience of the labyrinth of time that would go unrecorded otherwise! A writer records for value. A writer records for sentimentalism. A writer tries in earnest to carry the emotions and sentiments that make us what we ultimately are. For what are we? Empty spaces in an atom!
Avijeet Das
Our emotions pull us in different directions. The stronger the emotion, the greater the pull. Feelings are not always practical, nor do they make any logical sense. That's just the way it goes.
Lang Leav
It isn’t so much life’s problems that challenge us but the emotional turbulence stirred up while trying to deal with them. People possessing the gift of emotional detachment are lucky in that their personal problems seem far less problematic.
Richelle E. Goodrich
being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.
Thomas Hardy
But, despite everything, it was almost a pleasure to suffer those torments. I had crawled through life blindly and dully for so long, my heart had kept silent and had sat, impoverished, in a corner for so long, that even these self accusations, this horror, this whole ghastly emotion in my soul was welcome. After all, it was an emotion, flames were still rising, it showed that my heart was still alive! In a confused way, in the midst of misery I felt something like liberation and springtime.
Herman Hesse
The emotional states are liberated inside water, we calm down emotionally, we become more sensitive, we are able to "touch" deeper ourselves and other beings. Empathy is echoing back to us giving subtle vibrations from the realm of the senses. Find your water ~
Grigoris Deoudis
Joy, like love, is an impenetrable, God-given state of being. The distinctions between joy and happiness and love and affection are important ones under the notion that happiness is an 'iffy' emotion, a highly dependent feeling both aroused and destroyed by external conditions apart from God. And the distinction between love and affection is parallel to such.
Criss Jami
Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.
Marge Piercy
You can spend your life judging people or, you can spend it making friends. Take your pick.
Carroll Bryant
They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
Thomas Hardy
Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.
Thomas Hardy
In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.
Aberjhani
Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.
Aberjhani
I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.
Christopher Marlowe
I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty.
Herman Melville
schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The human soul is an abyss
Fernando Pessoa
the impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly.
Charles Bukowski
For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.
Hermann Hesse
It is human nature to try hardest to accomplish the very thing we are told is impossible.  Why?  Because innately we know that nothing's impossible.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I like a look of agony, because I know it's true
Emily Dickinson
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
W.B. Yeats
Mr. Cat and Mr. Dog were neighbors who fought like, well, cats and dogs. That is until Mr. Rat moved in. It's fascinating how easily two enemies ally at the introduction of a third.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.
Pindar
She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.
Robert Louis Stevenson
It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
Wonder of time,' quoth she, 'this is my spite,That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy:Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:It shall be waited on with jealousy,Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end,Ne'er settled equally, but high or low,That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.'It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud,Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while;The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'dWith sweets that shall the truest sight beguile:The strongest body shall it make most weak,Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak.'It shall be sparing and too full of riot,Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild,Make the young old, the old become a child.'It shall suspect where is no cause of fear;It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;It shall be merciful and too severe,And most deceiving when it seems most just;Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward,Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.'It shall be cause of war and dire events,And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire;Subject and servile to all discontents,As dry combustious matter is to fire:Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy,They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.
William Shakespeare
Humans are the smallest organs of the human body.
Shinjini Bhattacharjee
We tell the dead to rest in peace, when we should worry about the living to live in peace.
Anthony Liccione
Haven't you got it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past & that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed cops? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral & animal, all disorder, & so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business & the arts, & all theories, passions & systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action subjected to every possible & imaginable contingency & contradiction. Life. Life is a crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?
Blaise Cendrars
Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.
Rémy de Gourmont
Some things a girl has in her to say no to and some things cut her down before she knows she’s gone. Sure, some twiggy, thorny snap in her says: no, this is awry, this is a bent thing, in that place that tells her to belly up to the floor before anyone’s even shadowed the doorframe. But it don’t matter. You can’t ask why she did it, when she was warned, when she was told. The plum truth is you would too, if everything impossible stood out there saying you could be loved so perfect the past would go up like a firecracker and shatter across the dark.
Catherynne M. Valente
First came him, then came I, then he came again and then I was lost forever.
Alok Jagawat
People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
Charles Bukowski
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Why was it, she asked herself, that "animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?
Diane Ackerman
And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than the man.
Hermann Hesse
Nature to all things fixed the limits fitAnd wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.As on the land while here the ocean gains.In other parts it leaves wide sandy plainsThus in the soul while memory prevails,The solid power of understanding failsWhere beams of warm imagination play,The memory's soft figures melt awayOne science only will one genius fit,So vast is art, so narrow human witNot only bounded to peculiar arts,But oft in those confined to single partsLike kings, we lose the conquests gained before,By vain ambition still to make them moreEach might his several province well command,Would all but stoop to what they understand.
Alexander Pope
At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.
Margaret Atwood
You were correct, for all men have within them both that which is dark and that which is light. A man is a thing of many divisions, not a pure, clear flame such as you once were. His intellect often wars with his emotions, his will with his desires . . . his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that which was old, but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and noble dream. Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure. Always he mourns that which is gone and fears some part of that which is new. Reason opposes tradition. Emotions oppose the restrictions his fellow men lay upon him. Always, from the friction of these things, there arises the thing you called the curse of man and mocked; guilt!
Roger Zelazny
All Mad"'He is mad as a hare, poor fellow, And should be in chains,' you say,I haven't a doubt of your statement, But who isn't mad, I pray?Why, the world is a great asylum, And the people are all insane,Gone daft with pleasure or folly, Or crazed with passion and pain.The infant who shrieks at a shadow, The child with his Santa Claus faith,The woman who worships Dame Fashion, Each man with his notions of death,The miser who hoards up his earnings, The spendthrift who wastes them too soon,The scholar grown blind in his delving, The lover who stares at the moon.The poet who thinks life a paean, The cynic who thinks it a fraud,The youth who goes seeking for pleasure, The preacher who dares talk of God,All priests with their creeds and their croaking, All doubters who dare to deny,The gay who find aught to wake laughter, The sad who find aught worth a sigh,Whoever is downcast or solemn, Whoever is gleeful and gay,Are only the dupes of delusions— We are all of us—all of us mad.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Don't ever think you're alone here,We've just been trapped in different hells,And people aren't against you dear,They're just all for themselves.
Erin Hanson
How wrong and petty any life is.
David Wojahn
For Mercy has a human heart;Pity, a human face;And Love, the human form divine:And Peace the human dress.Songs of InnocenceCruelty has a human heartAnd jealousy a human face,Terror the human form divine,And secrecy the human dress.The human dress is forged iron,The human form a fiery forge,The human face a furnace seal'd,The human heart its hungry gorge.Songs of Experience - This poem was discovered posthumously.
William Blake
All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There is such a thing as righteous judgment, but it seems that lately the word 'judgment' has become a curse word, period. The issue isn't whether or not we're insightful enough to avoid being judgmental, but whether or not we're secure enough to accept being judged. It is inevitable for every conscious human being to judge. It may spring from insight and experience and sincerity, and in such cases, it is quite beneficial on the receiving end.
Criss Jami
You are the only one who can.
Carroll Bryant
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars.
Hermann Hesse
In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.
Robert Louis Stevenson
For Time calls only once, and that determines all.
Sophocles
The direction you choose to face determines whether you're standing at the end or the beginning of a road.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.
Barbara Kingsolver
Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life.
Mary Ruefle
Where were we? I've forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.Right. Yes. The usual choices.
Margaret Atwood
Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.
Thomas Hardy
Be good.See good.Choose good.It's a no-brainer.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.
Margaret Atwood