Quotes by Poets - Page 4

When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'
Hilaire Belloc
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.
Edith Sitwell
Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.
Henry Vaughan
Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
William Wordsworth
I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus teaching at least part-time at university level mingling too much for his work's good with academics doing as much writing as he can for the CBC and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.
George Woodcock
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
No tears and the writer no tears and the reader.
Robert Frost
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
W.H. Auden
Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
William Stafford
I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
William Stafford
Memoirs: the backstairs of history.
George Meredith
In adversity remember to keep an even mind.
Horace
What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? The hearts bleed longest and but heal to wear That which disfigures it.
Lord Byron
However confused the scene of our life appears however torn we may be who now do face that scene it can be faced and we can go on to be whole.
Muriel Rukeyser
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
William Shakespeare
Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.
Sir Walter Scott
Glee! The great storm is over!
Emily Dickinson
Failure is in a sense the highway to success inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true and very fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.
John Keats
Adversity is the first path to truth.
Lord Byron
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains losses and disappointments but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison
Excellence costs a great deal.
May Sarton
A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity till he has tasted adversity.
Sa'di
If you will call your troubles experiences and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you you will grow vigorous and happy however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
John Heywood
Worth makes the man and want of it the fellow The rest is all but leather and prunello.
Alexander Pope
Ay call it holy ground The soil where first they trod. They have left unstained what there they found - Freedom to worship God.
Felicia D. Hemans
Happy the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind and has given up worrying once and for all.
Ovid
If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
Gertrude Stein
The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
James Russell Lowell
Though life is made up of mere bubbles 'Tis better than many have For while we've a whole lot of troubles The most of them never occur.
Nixon Waterman
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
Maurice Maeterlinck
The worst is not so long as we can say "This is the worst."
William Shakespeare
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
Robert Frost
If you are doing your best you will not have time to worry about failure.
Robert Hillyer
Cast away care he that loves sorrow lengthens not a day nor can he buy tomorrow.
Thomas Dekker
A hundredload of worry will not pay an ounce of debt.
George Herbert
The world is full of beauty as other worlds above And if we did our duty it might be as full of love.
Gerald Massey
A mad world my masters.
John Taylor
So many worlds so much to do So little done such things to be.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players.
William Shakespeare
Why then the world's mine oyster Which I with sword will open.
William Shakespeare
This world is all a fleeting show For man's illusion given The smiles of joy the tears of woe Deceitful shine deceitful flow - There's nothing true but Heaven.
George Moore
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Gertrude Stein
Come follow me and leave the world to its babblings.
Dante Alighieri
The year's at the Spring And day's at the morn Morning's at seven The hillside's dew-pearled The lark's on the wing The snail's on the thorn: God's in his Heaven - All's right with the world!
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I have not loved the world nor the world me I have not flatter'd its rank breath nor bow'd To its idolatries a patient knee.
Lord Byron
Such stuff the world is made of.
William Cowper
Tools were made and born were hands Every farmer understands.
William Blake
No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him there is always work And tools to work withal for those who will And blessed are the horny hands of toil!
James Russell Lowell
How many a rustic Milton has passed by Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies no longer tameless then To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Women's art though created in solitude wells up out of community. There is clearly both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused and an explosion of creative energy bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
Adrienne Rich
Exchange is creation.
Muriel Rukeyser
Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty I woke and found that life was Duty.
Ellen Sturgis Hooper
The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight But they while their companions slept Were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Fortune is ever seen accompanying industry.
Oliver Goldsmith
Work is the province of cattle.
Dorothy Parker
Success is dependent on effort.
Sophocles