Quotes by Poets - Page 435

Oh I know it's cliché but yeah they say that great men make it in-To places few others who even do take the risk've ever been
Criss Jami
From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,There's nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends.
Hilaire Belloc
A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.
Pablo Neruda
Soy el desesperado, la palabra sin ecos, el que lo perdiò todo, y el que todo lo tuvo.
Pablo Neruda
hate blows a bubble of despair intohugeness world system universe and bang-fear buries a tomorrow under woeand up comes yesterday most green and young
E.E. Cummings
The Garden En robe de parade. - SamainLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wallShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,And she is dying piece-mealof a sort of emotional anaemia.And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.In her is the end of breeding.Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.She would like some one to speak to her,And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Pound
Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?
Jack Spicer
Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.
Naomi Shihab Nye
This, this indeed is to be accursed, For if we mortals love, or if we sing, We count our joys not by what we have, But by what kept us from that perfect thing.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.
Robert Bly
When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right.
Ted Kooser
I offer you what I have myPoverty
W.S. Merwin
A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.
Wisława Szymborska
Women Are Not RosesWomen have no beginningonly continualflows.Though rivers flowwomen are notrivers.Women are notrosesthey are not oceansor stars.i would like to tellher this buti think shealready knows.
Ana Castillo
Hay menos tiempo que lugar, no obstante, hay lugares que duran un minuto y para cierto tiempo no ha lugar.
Mario Benedetti
In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.
Aberjhani
Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S Eliot
All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.
W.H. Auden
Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.
W.H. Auden
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'dWhat oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,That gives us back the image of our mind.As shades more sweetly recommend the light,So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.
Alexander Pope
I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
John Clare
Welcome, thou kind deceiver!Thou best of thieves: who, with an easy key,Dost open life, and, unperceived by us,Even steal us from ourselves.
John Dryden
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Philip Larkin
How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.
Philip Levine
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
Robert W. Service
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
William Wordsworth
I do think that poetry is important though, if you don’t strive at it, if you don’t fill it full of stars and falseness.
Charles Bukowski
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Sylvia Plath
When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyleatop some crumbling building,spring to lifea resuscitated angel.
Saul Williams
I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!
Frank O'Hara
High FlightOh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthAnd danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirthof sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred thingsYou have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swungHigh in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flungMy eager craft through footless halls of air....Up, up the long, delirious, burning blueI’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.Where never lark, or even eagle flew —And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trodThe high untrespassed sanctity of space,- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee Jr.
Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,the dreamed as well as the lived—what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
Louise Glück
In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.
Mark Strand
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness -And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
Omar Khayyám
The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
Wallace Stevens
The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,They scorn the best I can do to relate them.
Walt Whitman
Look deeper through the telescopeand do not be afraid when the starscollide towards the darkness,because sometimes the most beautifulthings begin in chaos.
Robert M. Drake
loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shapeof a helicopter the same size as the helicopterand that's it's only skilland it isn't good enoughbut it's still amazing.
Tao Lin
La heradera del dia destruida.(The heiress of the destroyed day.)
Pablo Neruda
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred Tennyson
There came one and knocked at the door of the Beloved.And a voice answered and said, 'Who is there?'The lover replied, 'It is I.''Go hence,' returned the voice;'there is no room within for thee and me.'Then came the lover a second time and knocked and again the voice demanded,'Who is there?'He answered, 'It is thou.''Enter,' said the voice, 'for I am within.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I held a jewel in my fingerstAnd went to sleep.tThe day was warm, and winds were prosy;tI said: "'T will keep."I woke and chid my honest fingers,—The gem was gone;tAnd now an amethyst remembrancetIs all I own.
Emily Dickinson
I do think the barsThat kept my spirit in are burst - that IAm sailing with thee through the dizzy sky!How beautiful thou art!
John Keats
Poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. Auden
I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
Billy Collins
Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
A door jumpsout from shadows,then jumps away. Thisis what I've come to find:the back door, unlatched.Tooled by insular wind, itslams and slamswithout meaningto and without meaning.
Li-Young Lee
The fountains mingle with the river,And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever,With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single;All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle:— Why not I with thine? See! the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea:— What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?
W.H. Davies
Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
William Shakespeare
Think of what starlight And lamplight would lack Diamonds and fireflies If they couldn’t lean against Black. . . .
Mary O'Neill
I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I hear a man climb stairsand clear his throat outside our door.
Leonard Cohen
Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone,While pain and guilt still linger here below,Blindness and numbness--these please me alone;Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
And watch two men washing clothes,one makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. they seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there's really only one work.
Jalaluddin Rumi
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
W.H. Auden