Quotes by Poets - Page 218

When your mind is rich in the wisdom, and your heart is sensitive and filled with love, you are a person, who can change the world.
Ehsan Sehgal
The principle of vis inertiae (...) seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress
Edgar Allan Poe
Each one of you carries the potential to blossom like flowers. When you blossom, petals of your mind open and the fragrance spread far and near.
Banani Ray
They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.
Paul Celan
Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.
William Shakespeare
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.
Richard Chenevix Trench
AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry.— from "Thing Language
Jack Spicer
Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.
Anis Mojgani
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
Jack Gilbert
Everything is language.
Octavio Paz
We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.
Robert Kelly
She walks to a tableShe walk to table She is walking to a tableShe walk to table now What difference does it makeWhat difference it make In Nature, no completenessNo sentence really complete thought Language, like woman,Look best when free, undressed.
Wang Ping
Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.
Osip Mandelstam
Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.
Adrienne Rich
Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee.
Ben Jonson
In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.
Friedrich Hebbel
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.
Heinrich Heine
The tongue of man is a twisty thing.
Homer
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.
Joseph Brodsky
Clover['s] eyes are full of language.
Anne Sexton
Feelings or Emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are in your deepest place.
Judith Wright
At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.
Octavio Paz
As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best of it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves' cant, the only language at his disposal, in order not to be so abandoned.
Ingeborg Bachmann
The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.
Peter Levi
A Blessing on the PoetsPatient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker,Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover,Sharer and saver, muser and acher,You who are open to hide or uncover,Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;May language’s language, the silence that liesUnder each word, move you over and over,Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.
Annie Finch
Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?
Ray Gwyn Smith
The fact is that very few of us know what words mean; fewer still take the trouble to enquire. We calmly, we carelessly assume that our minds are identical with that of the writer, at least on that point; and then we wonder that there should be misunderstandings!The fact is (again!) that usually we don't really want to know; it is so very much easier to drift down the river of discourse, "lazily, lazily, drowsily, drowsily, In the noonday sun."Why is this so satisfactory? Because although we may not know what a word means, most words have a pleasant or unpleasant connotation, each for himself, either because of the ideas or images thus begotten, of hopes or memories stirred up, or merely for the sound of the word itself.
Aleister Crowley
What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you’re seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn’t have language for it.
Stuart Dybek
Language, because it is imperfect, cannot encompass experience in its raw and primal condition. To verbalize emotion and action is to decrease their impact.
Cirilo F. Bautista
The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.
John Sinclair
Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.
Elizabeth Winder
Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.
John Dolan
Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.
Octavio Paz
I was not born with English in my pocket.
Santosh Kalwar
You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was."Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.
Margaret Atwood
Poetry helps heal wounds.Makes them tangible.At the poetry reading I reada poem.A prophecy I wrote down. Almost couldn't go through with it.But it came outhurried and hotand by the endmy tongue was on fire.
Isabel Quintero
Language is a serious weapon in shining and sharing Truth. It is also a serious weapon used in its distortion.
Suzy Kassem
There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.
Lenore Kandel
Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.
Lenore Kandel
Fuck words, nothing spokencomprehends the defiantly ephemeral.I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exilein any language.
Eric Gamalinda
Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.
Laurence Overmire
I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
Langston Hughes
There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.
Mark Nepo
We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment, of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for—that is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit.
Eileen Myles
Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.
Maya Angelou
Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that's caught a cold.
Herta Müller
Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker.
John Mole
For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.
John Mole
Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.
Walt Whitman
You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.
Bänoo Zan
Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.
William Wordsworth
I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.
Jorge Luis Borges
My love translated sounds like a dead language.
Salma Deera
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn't just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly. Like when you whisper, You're just a hold, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband.
Maggie Nelson
Your language looks like a treasure map,' she said, 'if you forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the x, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is.
Kirmen Uribe