Quotes by Poets - Page 490

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.
Sylvia Plath
Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
Theodore Roethke
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
Cesare Pavese
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
Antonio Porchia
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T.S Eliot
A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Jack Kerouac
Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
What a strange thing!to be alivebeneath cherry blossoms.
Kobayashi Issa
I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....
Erica Jong
The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
Ben Okri
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be, or not to be: that is the question:Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;No more; and by a sleep to say we endThe heart-ache and the thousand natural shocksThat flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummationDevoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause: there's the respectThat makes calamity of so long life;For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,The insolence of office and the spurnsThat patient merit of the unworthy takes,When he himself might his quietus makeWith a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscover'd country from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,And enterprises of great pith and momentWith this regard their currents turn awry,And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisonsBe all my sins remember'd!
William Shakespeare
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.
Sylvia Plath
I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
Boris Pasternak
That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
Emily Dickinson
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Hermann Hesse
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
Barbara Kingsolver
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Jorge Luis Borges
Life is for the living.Death is for the dead.Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.
Langston Hughes
A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.
D.H. Lawrence
People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.
Jim Morrison
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.
John Greenleaf Whittier
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
May Sarton
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
Maya Angelou
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
Sylvia Plath
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;Who has left the world better than he found it,Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;Whose life was an inspiration;Whose memory a benediction.
Bessie Anderson Stanley
My wife with the hair of a wood fireWith the thoughts of heat lightningWith the waist of an hourglassWith the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tigerMy wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitudeWith the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earthWith the tongue of rubbed amber and glassMy wife with the tongue of a stabbed hostWith the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyesWith the tongue of an unbelievable stoneMy wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writingWith brows of the edge of a swallow's nestMy wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roofAnd of steam on the panesMy wife with shoulders of champagneAnd of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the iceMy wife with wrists of matchesMy wife with fingers of luck and ace of heartsWith fingers of mown hayMy wife with armpits of marten and of beechnutAnd of Midsummer NightOf privet and of an angelfish nestWith arms of seafoam and of riverlocksAnd of a mingling of the wheat and the millMy wife with legs of flaresWith the movements of clockwork and despairMy wife with calves of eldertree pithMy wife with feet of initialsWith feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinkingMy wife with a neck of unpearled barleyMy wife with a throat of the valley of goldOf a tryst in the very bed of the torrentWith breasts of nightMy wife with breasts of a marine molehillMy wife with breasts of the ruby's crucibleWith breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dewMy wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of daysWith the belly of a gigantic clawMy wife with the back of a bird fleeing verticallyWith a back of quicksilverWith a back of lightWith a nape of rolled stone and wet chalkAnd of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinkingMy wife with hips of a skiffWith hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathersAnd of shafts of white peacock plumesOf an insensible pendulumMy wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestosMy wife with buttocks of swans' backsMy wife with buttocks of springWith the sex of an irisMy wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypusMy wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeatMy wife with a sex of mirrorMy wife with eyes full of tearsWith eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needleMy wife with savanna eyesMy wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prisonMy wife with eyes of wood always under the axeMy wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
André Breton
He who seeks ecstasy in love should not complain of suffering.
Kahlil Gibran
I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm cuz I'd rather be left for dead than wondering what thunder sounds like.
Andrea Gibson
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below, and the saints above, for love is heaven, and heaven is love.
Walter Scott
Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?
Dorothy Parker
No matter how bad you want a person, if your hearts are in two different places, you’ll have to pass and move on.
Alexandra Elle
she lived with hurricane eyes and fell in love with the way the waves collapsed against her cheeks.
Christopher Poindexter
Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
Thomas Hardy
We outgrow love like other things and put it in a drawer, till it an antique fashion shows like costumes grandsires wore.
Emily Dickinson
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!
Roman Payne
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
Michael Ondaatje
Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the faces of the tulipsand the nodding morning glories,and into the windows of, even, themiserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was,dear star, that just happensto be where you are in the universeto keep us from ever-darkness,to ease us with warm touching,to hold us in the great hands of light –good morning, good morning, good morning.Watch, now, how I start the dayin happiness, in kindness.
Mary Oliver
You are evidence of your mother's strength, especially if you are a rebellious knucklehead and regardless she has always maintained her sanity.
Criss Jami
Self-righteousness is much like a spiritual egocentricity. It constitutes a secular type of love that thrives under conditionality, one in which is only existent after an individual meets the adopted standards of the condemner; oppositely, unconditional love is a holy love.
Criss Jami
Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame
 and dignity. You are God's lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.
Jalaluddin Rumi
As Unto the bow the the cord is ,So unto the man is woman;Though she bends him, she obeys him,Though she draws him , yet she follows:Useless each without the other.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Such a little thing really, a kiss... most people don't give it a moment's consideration. They kiss on meeting, they kiss on parting, that simple touching of flesh is taken entirely for granted as a basic human right.
Sarah Kay
So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty.
Haniel Long
There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.
Jeffrey McDaniel
I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know that there's nothing but light when I see you.
Shinji Moon
Were knowledge all, what were our needTo thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?
Christopher Brennan
Like time suspended, a wound unmended-- you and I. We had no ending, no said goodbye; For all my life, I'll wonder why.
Lang Leav
You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.
Boris Pasternak
To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?
Criss Jami
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
Kahlil Gibran
Wine enters through the mouth,Love, the eyes.I raise the glass to my mouth,I look at you,I sigh.
W.B. Yeats
Loving you was like going to war I never came back the same.
Warsan Shire
Desire is the kind of thing thateats youandleaves you starving.
Nayyirah Waheed
I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.
William Shakespeare
Love me sweet With all thou art Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the Lightest part, Love me in full Being.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Any time not spent on love is wasted.
Torquato Tasso
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
Sylvia Plath