Quotes by Poets - Page 20

Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug or throw themselves down before they always did they always will and if you don't make it of wood you must make it of words.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Each religion by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana
It is extremely difficult for a Jew to be converted for how can he bring himself to believe in the divinity of - another Jew?
Heinrich Heine
Man is a venerating animal. He venerates as easily as he purges himself. When they take away from him the gods of his fathers he looks for others abroad.
Max Jacob
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the Church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen - no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.
Robert Frost
And so do his sisters and his cousins and his aunts! His sisters and his cousins Whom he reckons up by dozens And his aunts!
W.S. Gilbert
Whatever with the past has gone the best is always yet to come.
Lucy Larcom
This is another day! Are its eyes blurred with maudlin grief for any wasted past? A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt! Let dust clasp dust death death I am alive!
Don Marquis
There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness.
Dante Alighieri
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The profits of good luck are perishable if you build on fortune you build on sand the more advancement you achieve the more dangers you run.
Marquis de Racan
An indefinable something is to be done in a way nobody knows how at a time nobody knows when that will accomplish nobody knows what.
Thomas B. Read
What the reason of the ant laboriously drags into a heap the wind of accident will collect in one breath.
J. C. F. von Schiller
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
Bret Harte
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
George Meredith
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.
Alexander Pope
Reason can in general do more than blind force.
Gallus
You know my friends with what a brave carouse I made a second marriage in my house Divorced old barren reason from my bed And took the daughter of the vine to spouse.
Omar Khayyám
He who will not reason is a bigot he who cannot is a fool and he who dares not is a slave.
William Drummond
Every why hath a wherefore.
William Shakespeare
I have no other but a woman's reason. I think him so because I think him so.
William Shakespeare
Reason is also choice.
John Milton
Reason is an emotion for the sexless.
Heathcote Williams
The difference between the reason of man and the instinct of the beast is this that the beast does but know but the man knows that he knows.
John Donne
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound Tokens of love and hate black sorcery stones.
Stephen Vincent Benét
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Reason is God's gift but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.
Cardinal Newman
Men expect too much do too little.
Allen Tate
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
Hermann Hesse
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
There is no such thing as pure pleasure some anxiety always goes with it.
Ovid
The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.
Oliver Goldsmith
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.
Friedrich Hölderlin
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Johann von Goethe
Life is a perilous voyage.
Palladas
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
A pint can't hold a quart-if it holds a pint it is doing all that can be expected of it.
Margaret Deland
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
Vexed sailors curse the rain for which poor shepherds prayed in vain.
Edmund Waller
Be still sad heart and cease repining Behind the clouds is the sun still shining Thy fate is the common fate of all Into each life some rain must fall Some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison
In the world of mules there are no rules.
Ogden Nash
Bland as a Jesuit sober as a hymn.
William Ernest Henley
Epitaph to a waiter: By and by God caught his eye.
David McCord
Parsely is gharsley.
Ogden Nash
What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
Bertolt Brecht
I don't know much about being a millionaire but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.
Dorothy Parker
The Right Honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Dorothy Parker
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
George Herbert
There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Gertrude Stein
One bliss for which there is no match is when you itch to up and scratch.
Ogden Nash
Nothing endures but personal qualities.
Walt Whitman
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
Juvenal
Many individuals have like uncut diamonds shining qualities beneath a rough exterior.
Juvenal
Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no fibs.
Oliver Goldsmith
He that would pun would pick a pocket.
Alexander Pope