Quotes by Poets - Page 23

Am I like the optimist who while falling ten stories from a building says at each story "I'm all right so far"?
Gretel Ehrlich
If any has a stone to throw It is not I ever or now.
Elinor Wylie
Do not sit long with a sad friend. When you go to a garden do you look at the weeds? Spend more time with the roses and jasmines.
Jelaluddin Rumi
True revolutions ... restore more than they destroy.
Louise Bogan
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
George Meredith
A sneer is like a flame it may occasionally be curative because it cauterizes but it leaves a bitter scar.
Margaret Deland
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell a hell of heaven.
John Milton
Happiness is not a matter of events it depends upon the tides of the mind.
Alice Meynell
Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.
Jacopo Sannazaro
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
They can because they think they can.
Virgil
Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
All that a man does outwardly is but the expression and completion of his inward thought. To work effectively he must think clearly to act nobly he must think nobly.
William Ellery Channing
All seems infected that the infected spy as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Alexander Pope
The more wary you are of danger the more likely you are to meet it.
Jean de La Fontaine
For years I wanted to be older and now I am.
Margaret Atwood
Life has indeed many ills but the mind that views every object in its most cheering aspect and every doubtful dispensation as replete with latent good bears within itself a powerful and perpetual antidote.
Lydia H. Sigourney
Man's real life is happy chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe
To think of losing is to lose already.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
I think there is a choice possible to us at any moment as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always she had to admit interesting.
May Sarton
You have to believe in happiness or happiness never comes.
Douglas Malloch
Damned Neuters in their Middle way of Steering Are neither Fish nor Flesh nor good Red Herring.
John Dryden
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
William Shakespeare
I always voted at my party's call And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
W.S. Gilbert
It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.
Eugene McCarthy
A statesman is an easy man He tells his lies by rote A journalist makes up his lies And takes you by the throat So stay at home and drink your beer And let the neighbours vote.
William Butler Yeats
He's like a football coach who's smart enough to win the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
Eugene McCarthy
The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honour the territorial imperative.
Eugene McCarthy
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
Eugene McCarthy
Party-spirit . . . which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.
Alexander Pope
a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.
E.E. Cummings
A ginooine statesman should be on his guard if he must hev beliefs not to b'lieve 'em too hard.
James Russell Lowell
A Liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
Robert Frost
A councillor ought not to sleep the whole night through - a man to whom the populace is entrusted and who has many responsibilities.
Homer
A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.
William Shakespeare
What is the test of good manners? Being able to bear patiently with bad ones.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Ah men do not know how much strength is in poise that he goes the farthest who goes far enough.
James Russell Lowell
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
An art in which the artist by means of rhythm and great sincerity can convey to others the sentiment which he feels about life.
John Masefield
Poets aren't very useful because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.
Ogden Nash
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
Phyllis McGinley
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
Walt Whitman
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.
Maxwell Bodenheim
For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
Sylvia Plath
The man recover'd of the bite The dog it was that died.
Oliver Goldsmith
Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.
Robert Frost
A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Marianne Moore
Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose - words in their best order poetry - the best words in their best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
William Butler Yeats
Science is for those who learn poetry for those who know.
Joseph Roux
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.
T.S Eliot