Quotes by Poets - Page 414

The greatest risk to man is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he aims too low and hits.
Michaelangelo
The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
Beauty and grace command the world.
Park Benjamin
I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue and accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and have just been born today.
Hermann Hesse
Is it true, O Christ in heaven, that the highest suffer the most?That the strongest wander furthest and most hopelessly are lost?That the mark of rank in nature is capacity for pain?That the anguish of the singer makes the sweetness of the strain?
John Milton
There's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream.
Thomas Moore
Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.
Aberjhani
But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sight.
Robert Frost
Even after the stormiest weather, a true warrior will still reflect the brilliant rays of the magnificent sun through both his or her eyes. You may get hit by sudden lighting or take severe beatings from the cruel wind, but you will always get back up and stand strong on your feet again, soak in the sunlight, and be prepared to get hit by even the most merciless hail - time and time again.
Suzy Kassem
Forgetting takes space./Forgotten matters displace/as much anything else as/anything else. We must/skirt unlabeled crates/as thought it made sense/and take them when we go/to other states.
Kay Ryan
If we have not struggled/as hard as we can/at our strongest/how will we sense/the shape of our losses/or know what sustains/us longest or name/what change costs us,/saying how strange/it is that one sector/of the self can step in/for another in trouble,/how loss activates/a latent double, how/we can feed/as upon nectar/upon need?
Kay Ryan
Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.
Leonard Cohen
Come to the edge.We might fall.Come to the edge.It's too high!COME TO THE EDGE!And they cameAnd he pushedAnd they flew.
Christopher Logue
A too closely watched flower/blossoms the wrong color./Excess attention to the jonquil/turns it gentian. Flowers/need it tranquil to get/their hues right. Some/only open at midnight.
Kay Ryan
The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.
Aberjhani
Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water.
Malcolm Lowry
Gaps don't/just happen./There is a/generative element/inside them,/a welling motion/as when cold/waters shoulder/up through/warmer oceans./And where gaps/choose to widen,/coordinates warp,/even in places/constant since/the oldest maps.
Kay Ryan
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
Kingsley Amis
Action creates/a taste/for itself.
Kay Ryan
Not even waste/is inviolate./The day misspent,/the love misplaced,/has inside it/the seed of redemption./Nothing is exempt from resurrection.
Kay Ryan
Which road, which road did you takeThat brought you here at last?No road, no road did I take.I leaped, I leaped from dream to dream.
Franz Werfel
He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Roam abroad in the world, and take thy fill of its enjoyments before the day shall come when thou must quit it for good.
Saadi
Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.
Frances Mayes
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!
William Shakespeare
If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.
Charles Bukowski
Every day is a journey filled with twists and turns. Every day, if you smile, you will feel alive, my son.
Santosh Kalwar
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Rule your mind or it will rule you.
Horace
Sometimes questions are more important than answers.
Nancy Willard
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T.S Eliot
If you think you are beaten, you areIf you think you dare not, you don't,If you like to win, but you think you can'tIt is almost certain you won't.If you think you'll lose, you're lostFor out of the world we find,Success begins with a fellow's willIt's all in the state of mind.If you think you are outclassed, you areYou've got to think high to rise,You've got to be sure of yourself beforeYou can ever win a prize.Life's battles don't always goTo the stronger or faster man,But soon or late the man who winsIs the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!
Walter D. Wintle
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
William Blake
We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.
José Martí
Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.
Dorianne Laux
Never judge a work of art by its defects
Washington Allston
The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.
Roman Payne
When you ask God for a gift, Be thankful if he sends, Not diamonds, pearls or riches, but the love of real true friends.
Helen Steiner Rice
Love has no culture, boundaries, race and religion. It is pure and beautiful like early morning sunrise falling in lake.
Santosh Kalwar
I stay cool, and dig all jive,That's the way I stay alive.My motto, as I live and learn, isDig and be dugIn return.
Langston Hughes
Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.”"Be patient and tough; one day this pain will be useful to you.
Ovid
Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.
Maya Angelou
Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.You can do it.
Sherman Alexie
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake
Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
Rabindranath Tagore
Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.
Maya Angelou
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
Hermann Hesse
Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.
Edgar Allan Poe
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
Maya Angelou
Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.
Maya Angelou
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.
Malcolm Lowry
A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.", Harper's Magazine, May 1948)
W.H. Auden
I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day a novel should not be interrupted.
François Mauriac
Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.
Wendy Cope
A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
Thomas Hardy
I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...
George Gordon Byron