Quotes by Poets - Page 489

Pain or love or danger makes you real again....
Jack Kerouac
When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.
Criss Jami
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."]
Anne Bradstreet
I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just...in between.
Jim Morrison
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter,the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands,the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!
Roman Payne
Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
Sarah Kay
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
Langston Hughes
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Max Ehrmann
I slept and I dreamed that life is all joy. I woke and I saw that life is all service. I served and I saw that service is joy.
Kahlil Gibran
Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why.
William Stafford
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare
I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.
Raymond Carver
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.
Sylvia Plath
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa
I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
Thomas Hardy
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
Charles Bukowski
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T.S Eliot
The beautiful is always bizarre.
Charles Baudelaire
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life
Jack Kerouac
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
Jorge Luis Borges
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
George Gordon Byron
The Laughing Heartyour life is your lifedon’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.be on the watch.there are ways out.there is a light somewhere.it may not be much light butit beats the darkness.be on the watch.the gods will offer you chances.know them.take them.you can’t beat death butyou can beat death in life, sometimes.and the more often you learn to do it,the more light there will be.your life is your life.know it while you have it.you are marvelousthe gods wait to delightin you.
Charles Bukowski
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged
Heinrich Heine
EARLY BIRDOh, if you’re a bird, be an early birdAnd catch the worm for your breakfast plate.If you’re a bird, be an early early bird--But if you’re a worm, sleep late.
Shel Silverstein
It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.
D.H. Lawrence
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best.
Philip James Bailey
I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.
Maya Angelou
You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don't. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.
Jalaluddin Rumi
O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d; Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer.That you are here—that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
Walt Whitman
I wish to weepbut sorrow isstupid.I wish to believebut belief is agraveyard.
Charles Bukowski
Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.
Criss Jami
The great object of life is sensation- to feel that we exist, even though in pain.
George Gordon Byron
The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.
Bertolt Brecht
When it's over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don't want to wonderif I have made of my life something particular, and real.I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver
Earth's crammed with heaven...But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
MagicSandra’s seen a leprechaun,Eddie touched a troll,Laurie danced with witches once,Charlie found some goblins gold.Donald heard a mermaid sing,Susy spied an elf,But all the magic I have knownI've had to make myself.
Shel Silverstein
No one here gets out alive.
Jim Morrison
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
Walt Whitman
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Kahlil Gibran
Style is the answer to everything.A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thingTo do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without itTo do a dangerous thing with style is what I call artBullfighting can be an artBoxing can be an artLoving can be an artOpening a can of sardines can be an artNot many have styleNot many can keep styleI have seen dogs with more style than men,although not many dogs have style.Cats have it with abundance.When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,that was style.Or sometimes people give you styleJoan of Arc had styleJohn the BaptistJesusSocratesCaesarGarcía Lorca.I have met men in jail with style.I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.
Charles Bukowski
There's gon' be some stuff you gon' seethat's gon' make it hard to smile in the future.But through whatever you see,through all the rain and the pain,you gotta keep your sense of humor.You gotta be able to smile through all this bullshit.Remember that.
Tupac Shakur
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
Jack Kerouac
For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S Eliot
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.
William Shakespeare
It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.
Charles Bukowski
If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
Fernando Pessoa
Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.
Homer
When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around us becomeslight, rare, sterile.We breathe, briefly.Our eyes, briefly,see witha hurtful clarity.Our memory, suddenly sharpened,examines,gnaws on kind wordsunsaid,promised walksnever taken.Great souls die andour reality, bound tothem, takes leave of us.Our souls,dependent upon theirnurture,now shrink, wizened.Our minds, formedand informed by theirradiance,fall away.We are not so much maddenedas reduced to the unutterable ignoranceof dark, coldcaves.And when great souls die,after a period peace blooms,slowly and alwaysirregularly. Spaces fillwith a kind ofsoothing electric vibration.Our senses, restored, neverto be the same, whisper to us.They existed. They existed.We can be. Be and bebetter. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
Life ... is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Mary Oliver
Life's as kind as you let it be.
Charles Bukowski
I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty...But I am too busy thinking about myself.
Edith Sitwell
Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Jean Racine
I know it seems hard sometimes but remember one thing. Through every dark night, there's a bright day after that. So no matter how hard it get, stick your chest out, keep ya head up.... and handle it.
Tupac Shakur
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.
Sylvia Plath