Quotes by Poets - Page 402

The world is on fire time is a bomb.Ten thousand years are not enoughWhen so much remains to be done
Jeet Thayil
Our names were made for us in another century.
Richard Brautigan
I spur my horse past the ruined city;the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts:ancient battlements, high and low;old grave mounds, great and small.Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed tremblesand the voice of the great trees clings forever,I sigh over all these common bones --No roll of the immortals bears their names.
Han-shan
Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.
Dejan Stojanovic
[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Herman Melville
When I do count the clock that tells the time,And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;When I behold the violet past prime,And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;When lofty trees I see barren of leavesWhich erst from heat did canopy the herd,And summer's green all girded up in sheavesBorne on the bier with white and bristly beard,Then of thy beauty do I question make,That thou among the wastes of time must go,Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsakeAnd die as fast as they see others grow;And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defenceSave breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
William Shakespeare
One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.
Jorge Luis Borges
How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?
Cameron Conaway
O Space and Time and stars at strife,How dreadful your infinity!Shrined by your termless trinity,How strange, how terrible, is life!(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
George Sterling
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
John Ashbery
... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...
Joseph Brodsky
The distance of a voice, is only a short time away from touch.
Anthony Liccione
Four days will quickly steep themselves in nightsFour nights will quickly dream away the time.
William Shakespeare
Rare and precious moments, how I long to live with you eternally! If only your sweetness never ceased to touch my lips, and the flutters you evoke nevermore faded away. I dream of your arm extended immeasurably to keep hold of my reaching hand. But Father Time, being a cruel master, will not grant such a wish. And so I tuck you away as cherished memories, stored in a treasure box buried in my heart. And in times of solitude, I shall bring you out to view like rainbows.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every moment.
T.S Eliot
TIMETimeAnd how it slips through my fingersWithout putting its ring on them,And I remain simply its lover
Visar Zhiti
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.
Margaret Atwood
The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether." These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion.
Lawrence Durrell
Listen to the time as it can heal everything.
Sorin Cerin
We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.
Criss Jami
And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges
The TelephoneWhen I was just as far as I could walkFrom here todayThere was an hourAll stillWhen leaning with my head against a flowerI heard you talk.Don't say I didn't for I heard you sayYou spoke from that flower on the window sill-Do you remember what it was you said ''First tell me what it was you thought you heard.''Having found the flower and driven a bee awayI leaned my headAnd holding by the stalkI listened and I thought I caught the wordWhat was itDid you call me by my name Or did you saySomeone said "Come"I heard it as I bowed.''I may have thought as much but not aloud.'Well so I came.
Robert Frost
For he lives twice who can at once employ,The present well, and e’en the past enjoy.
Alexander Pope
O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning!It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,I will have thousands of globes and all time.
Walt Whitman
From time to time, one must release the grime built up inside them to to free their emotions like the ocean.
Suzy Kassem
Look back on Time, with kindly eyes -He doubtless did his best -How softly sinks that trembling sunIn Human Nature's West -
Emily Dickinson
Every moment is a crossroad in time. Consider that, as above so below and as inside so outside and live accordingly.
Grigoris Deoudis
Time goes on crutches till love have all his rites.
William Shakespeare
He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
Margaret Atwood
I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!' 'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering. 'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.
Roman Payne
Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.
Roger Zelazny
Perhaps time’s definition of coal is the diamond.
Kahlil Gibran
Any time gone by was better.
Jorge Manrique
Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
Barbara Kingsolver
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
Fernando Pessoa
a life can change in a tenth ofa second.or sometimes it can take70years.
Charles Bukowski
Things take the time they take.Don't worry.How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
Mary Oliver
As a breath on glass, -As witch-fires that burn,The gods and monsters pass,Are dust, and return.(“The Face of the Skies”)
George Sterling
... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
Hermann Hesse
If the whole world I once could seeOn free soil stand, with the people freeThen to the moment might I say,Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.
Mark Doty
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate;Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions,Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
there's time for laughing and there's time for crying— for hoping for despair for peace for longing —a time for growing and a time for dying: a night for silence and a day for singingbut more than all(as all your more than eyes tell me)there is a time for timelessness
E.E. Cummings
When the rare chance comes, seize itTo do the rare deed.
Thiruvalluvar
The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.
Roman Payne
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Diane Ackerman
How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting?Better go drunk and begging round the taverns.Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yoursWill make a cup, bowl, one day a jar.When once you hear the roses are in bloom,Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine;Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell-These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.
Omar Khayyám
The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows
André Breton
I care not that this moment’s lot was thin and sparsely dealt all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt.
Roman Payne
Love is not loveWhich alters when alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:Oh, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,that looks on tempests and is never shaken.
William Shakespeare
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence—neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish—it is an imponderably valuable gift.
Maya Angelou
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.
Roberto Bolaño
Put up in a placewhere it is easy to seethe cryptic admonishmentT.T.TWhen you feel how depressinglyslowly you climbit's well to remember thatThings Take Time.
Piet Hein
Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.
Sherman Alexie
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
W.B. Yeats
You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Raymond Carver
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans Show minutes, times, and hours.
William Shakespeare
There was a beautiful time...
Sylvia Plath
From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.
Roman Payne