Quotes by Poets - Page 488

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.
D.H. Lawrence
This is the strangest life I have ever known.
Jim Morrison
It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
Don't let your luggage define your travels, each life unravels differently.
Shane L. Koyczan
Be in love with your life, every detail of it.
Jack Kerouac
There are two ways to live a life either forget everything or, remember nothing.
Santosh Kalwar
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Do not become someone else just because you are hurt. Be who you are & smile, it may solve, all problems you have got.
Santosh Kalwar
Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.
Carl Sandburg
War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.
Catherynne M. Valente
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
T.S Eliot
Know who you are, and be it. Know what you want, and go out and get it!
Carroll Bryant
Life is ours to be spent, not tobe saved.
D.H. Lawrence
My life has been one great big joke,A dance that's walked,A song that's spoke,I laugh so hard I almost choke,When I think about myself.
Maya Angelou
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.
Arthur Rimbaud
Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since "the rest of your life" won’t last forever.
Omar Khayyám
Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.
Sylvia Plath
You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.
Hermann Hesse
When someone is seeking,” said Siddartha, “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
Hermann Hesse
Like madness is the glory of this life.
William Shakespeare
I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
Hermann Hesse
A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.
Carl Sandburg
What kind of life can you have in a house without books?
Sherman Alexie
I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
Hermann Hesse
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;Thy fate is the common fate of all,Into each life some rain must fall
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't sit still;So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest.
Robert W. Service
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?
Charles Baudelaire
I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads
Federico García Lorca
Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way.
Nick Flynn
I was lost yesterday, I am found today and I will be forgotten tomorrow.
Santosh Kalwar
Demasiada cordura puede ser la peor de las locuras, ver la vida como es y no como debería de ser.Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
For JennAt 12 years old I started bleeding with the moonand beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.I fought with my knuckles white as stars,and left bruises the shape of Salem.There are things we know by heart,and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,but I could never make dying beautiful.The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myselfveins are kite strings you can only cut free.I suppose I love this life,in spite of my clenched fist.I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,and I wonder if Beethoven held his breaththe first time his fingers touched the keysthe same way a soldier holds his breaththe first time his finger clicks the trigger.We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.But my lungs rememberthe day my mother took my hand and placed it on her bellyand told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.And I knew life would tremblelike the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,like a prayer on a dying man's lips,like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…just take me just take meSometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,but you still have to call it a birthday.You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recessand hope she knows you can hit a baseballfurther than any boy in the whole third gradeand I've been running for homethrough the windpipe of a man who singswhile his hands playing washboard with a spoonon a street corner in New Orleanswhere every boarded up window is still painted with the wordsWe're Coming Backlike a promise to the oceanthat we will always keep moving towards the music,the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open.The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert,then wake us washing the feet of pregnant womenwho climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.I know the heartbeat of his mother.Don't cover your ears, Love.Don't cover your ears, Life.There is a boy writing poems in Central Parkand as he writes he movesand his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,and there are men playing chess in the December coldwho can't tell if the breath rising from the boardis their opponents or their own,and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subwayswearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrunwith strip malls and traffic and vendorsand one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home.
Andrea Gibson
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
Fernando Pessoa
Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.
Michel Houellebecq
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore
Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
Jalaluddin Rumi
LearningTo believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
Czesław Miłosz
But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.
Raymond Carver
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
Fernando Pessoa
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore
Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, for it has yet to come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering
Ida Scott Taylor McKinney
Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
Charles Bukowski
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
Margaret Atwood
Good works is giving to the poor and the helpless, but divine works is showing them their worth to the One who matters.
Criss Jami
Never forget:we walk on hell,gazing at flowers.
Kobayashi Issa
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
You look ridiculous if you danceYou look ridiculous if you don't danceSo you might as welldance.
Gertrude Stein
To live is to war with trolls.
Henrik Ibsen
Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
André Breton
all of us have a place in history. mine is clouds.
Richard Brautigan
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Michel Houellebecq
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph Brodsky
All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,In fair round belly with good capon lined,With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws and modern instances;And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slippered pantaloon,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare
Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.
Ani DiFranco
Fate loves the fearless.
James Russell Lowell
What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
Barbara Kingsolver
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
Charles Baudelaire
Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Anne Sexton