Quotes by Poets - Page 80

Into each life some rain must fall some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is no easy path leading out of life and few are the easy ones that lie within it.
Walter Savage Landor
There is no armor against fate death lays his icy hands on kings.
James Shirley
Achilles absent was Achilles still.
Homer
Let no one be willing to speak ill of the absent.
Propertius
All that is necessary is to accept the impossible do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.
Kathleen Norris
Self-complacency is fatal to progress.
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing while others judge us by what we have already done.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Each morning sees some task begun Each evening sees it close. Something attempted something done Has earned a night's repose.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There are two kinds of people: those who are always well and those who are always sick. Most of the evils of the world come from the first sort and most of the achievements from the second.
Louis Dudek
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Thomas Haynes Bayly
They are able because they think they are able.
Virgil
Sometimes when one person is missing the whole world seems depopulated.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility I think 'whatsoever thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might ' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbour as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbour you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The only way round is through.
Robert Frost
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
Horace
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
Robert Louis Stevenson
They are able who think they are able.
Virgil
You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The city's all brightnessand shadow, deckle-edged, bluer than air-there's no help anywhere-you no longer know how to listen.
Ralph Angel
Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve
Charles Baudelaire
I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, But my heart was full of my new love's glory, My eyes were laughing and unafraid.I met one who had loved me madly And told his love for all to hear -- But we talked of a thousand things together, The past was buried too deep to fear.I met the other, whose love was given With never a kiss and scarcely a word -Oh, it was then the terror took me Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die - but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years…I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, My heart was full of my new love's glory, - But my eyes were suddenly afraid.
Sara Teasdale
Song of myselfI am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine, One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same, A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian, A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye; At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland, At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking, At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch, Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,) Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat, A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest, A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. I resist any thing better than my own diversity, Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
Walt Whitman
The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.
Aberjhani
To be social is to be forgiving.
Robert Frost
If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated.
Denise Riley
Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions, and learn to determine the value of your individual and collective action, however directed on material ends, in the light of the ideal which you are supposed to represent. Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity.
Muhammad Iqbal
The problem with a lot people is, they are more concerned about their image than they are about their reputation. It should be the other way around.
Carroll Bryant
Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me.December 97My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and - once the crisis is over - leaves me in mortal terror of myself.Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing - for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me... and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect.Afterwards, I was ashamed.I am always ashamed of myself nowadays. The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish.Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city - all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities - I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy - so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love.Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird!Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths... those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers... fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises... nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and...It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon... a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!
Jean Lorrain
But man, proud man,Dress'd in a little brief authority,Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—His glassy essence—like an angry apePlays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,Would all themselves laugh mortal.
William Shakespeare
And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.
Catherynne M. Valente
I have a high art: I hurt with cruelty those who would wound me.
Archilochus
So muchhuman cruelty is simplyincidental is simplybrainless. Simply nocommon sense. You couldtake the entirety of thecommon sense of humansand put it in the palm ofyour hand and still haveroom for your dick.
Anne Carson
It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.
Jean Genet
If you want to leave a legacy...leave it now, every day of your life, not just after you are gone or only as a result of a narrowly defined way of contributing. With every thought, word, and deed you leave something behind. You get to choose whether you leave a legacy of impossibility or possibility, of denigration, or celebration, of unkindness, or kindness, of judgment, or acceptance, of struggles or grace, of discouragement or encouragement, of frailty or strength, of tears of laughter, of fear or love. What is n your heart to leave as a legacy, in this moment...and now this one?
Cathy Drew. Poet
I preserve my worldin journals so my children can eat without me
Nikki Skies
Maybe I wanted to have kids because you want to leave behind lessons, leave behind everything that matters to you. That's how you touch the world. But I have to reconsider what it's like to leave a legacy.
Mattie Stepanek
Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
It [freedom] rings bells to remind humanity that the most precious gifts in life––like children and love and time––must never be taken for granted.
Aberjhani
Freedom rings bells to wake us from the comfort of beautiful dreams and empower the efforts that turn them into reality.
Aberjhani
In its essence, Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is one citizen’s soul-searing plea with his countrymen––Whites and Blacks––to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America’s ability to shine as a true beacon of democracy in a world filled with people groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease.
Aberjhani
First of all, they came to take the gypsiesand I was happy because they pilfered.Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing, because they were unpleasant to me.Then they came to take homosexuals,and I was relieved, because they were annoying me.Then they came to take the Communists,and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.One day they came to take me,and there was nobody left to protest.Bertold Brecht, inspired by Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin Niemöller
Bertolt Brecht
Unbelievably, while many non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and America’s Watch have denounced the human rights situation in Cuba, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro.
Armando Valladares
Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favourite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'.
Wole Soyinka
Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.
A.C. Benson
Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say ...
Barbara Kingsolver
The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.
Margaret Atwood
some libraries are no longer called libraries but are known as Learning Resource Centers or Media Centers. Librarians, however, are still generally known as librarians and not yet as Learning Resourcists or Media Centerists, though this may be only a matter of time.
Richard Armour
You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !
Catherynne M. Valente
In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.
William Stafford
I tell you, if you feel strange, strange things will happen to you: Fallen peacocks on library shelves
Rita Dove
the rent is a little higher herebut so far I've been able to pay itand that's a miracle toolike still maybe being sanewhile thinking of guns and sidewalksand old ladies in libraries.
Charles Bukowski
My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything—so long as it beings with A through L.
Catherynne M. Valente
Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
Anne Sexton
She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.
Catherynne M. Valente
Never wish for someone else's life because you never know if they also wish yours was theirs.
Gugu Mona
He wasted his wishes on wishing.
Shel Silverstein