Quotes by Poets - Page 84

Why stay we on earth except to grow?
Robert Browning
Now to enjoy the treasures of God in the similitude of God, is the most perfect blessedness God could devise. For the treasures of God are the most perfect treasures, and the manner of God is the most perfect manner.
Thomas Traherne
Either give it your all or don't even try!
Avijeet Das
Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Omar Khayyám
An Arundel TombSide by side, their faces blurred,The earl and countess lie in stone,Their proper habits vaguely shownAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,And that faint hint of the absurd -The little dogs under their feet.Such plainness of the pre-BaroqueHardly involves the eye, untilIt meets his left-hand gauntlett, stillClasped empty in the other, andOne sees with a sharp tender shockHis hand withdrawn, holding her hand.They would not think to lie so long,Such faithfulness in effigyWas just a detail friends would see,A sculptor's sweet commissioned graceThrown off in helping to prolongThe Latin names around the base.They would not guess how early inTheir supine stationary voyageThe air would change to soundless damage,Turn the old tenantry away;How soon succeeding eyes beingTo look, not read. Rigidly, theyPersisted, linked, through lengths and breadthsOf time. Snow fell, undated. LightEach summer thronged the grass. A brightLitter of birdcalls strewed the sameBone-littered ground. And up the pathsThe endless altered people cameWashing at their identity.Now helpless in the hollowOf an unarmorial age, a troughOf smoke in slow suspended skeinsAbove their scrap of history,Only an attitude remains.Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon and to proveOur almost-instinct almost-true:What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.
Théophile Gautier
We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.
Charles Lamb
Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut you with my knife,because the cancer has to be removed.Forgive me for not telling you, but I’mno poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgivemy gloves, my callous greeting, my unease—you must not realize I just met deathagain. Forgive me if I say he lookedimpatient. Please, forgive me my despair,which once seemed more like recompense. Forgivemy greed, forgive me for not having moreto give you than this bitter pill. Forgive:for this apology, too late, for thoselike me whose crimes might seem innocuousand yet whose cruelty was obvious.Forgive us for these sins. Forgive me, please,for my confusing heart that sounds so muchlike yours. Forgive me for the night, when Isleep too, beside you under the same moon.Forgive me for my dreams, for my rough knees,for giving up too soon. Forgive me, please,for losing you, unable to forgive.
Rafael Campo
Your faces are very beautiful,but they are wooden cages.You had better run from me.My words are fire.
Jalaluddin Rumi
The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.
Virgil
Your life is a sum of counted breaths.With each breath that passesa part of life is lost. That which gives life brings death every moment nearer,and your caravan is led by onewho will not jest with you.
Abu'l-'Atahiya
Bugle"Black beetles know where the most recent bonesbake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--they will lead you to a barren gulchsurrounded by sages and nettles, dirtburnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunchabove the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body,words that matter: love me, love me not.
Tod Marshall
The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Ere the horne'd owl hoot Once and twice and thrice there shall Go among the blind brown worms News of thy great burial; When the pomp is passed away, 'Here's a King,' the worms shall say.
Adelaide Crapsey
That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.
George Herbert
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Omar Khayyám
I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric productAnd look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.
Walt Whitman
This is to be mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality.
George Gordon Byron
Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spinThe Thread of present Life away to win-What? for ourselves, who know not if we shallBreathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!
Omar Khayyám
Even if their supplies of love are finite, they've figured out that life is, too, and they're no longer rationing.
Julianna Baggott
Death, only death, can break the lasting chain;And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain
Alexander Pope
Don't listen to a man who says we have to work together as a team. He means we have to work as he says.
C.J. Langenhoven
It does not mean much to be important. The most important man at a burial is dead.
C.J. Langenhoven
Nice customs curtsy to great kings.
William Shakespeare
The course of true love never die run smooth
William Shakespeare
I had nothing to offer anybody except for my own confusion
Jack Kerouac
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,That he should weep for her?
William Shakespeare
Thus with most careful devotionThus with precise attentionTo detail, interfering preparationOf that which is already preparedMen tighten the knot of confusionInto perfect misunderstanding.
T.S Eliot
Praise from your heart caresses my soul.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Praise, my dear one.Let us disappear into praising.Nothing belongs to us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,like winter, which even now is passing.For beneath the winter is a winter so endlessthat to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.Climb praising as you return to connection.Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.The emptiness inside you allows you to vibratein full resonance with your world. Use it for once.To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayablenumbers of beings abounding in Nature,add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Praise is the most efficient tool to win many battles at once. It is through praise that the walls of Jericho collapsed, the same way Paul and Silas praised their way out of jail.
Gugu Mona
And if I please you so, my lover,Remember praise is comely.
Countee Cullen
Seeking nothing, emulating nothing, breathing gently, he moved in an atmosphere of imperishable calm, impresihable light, inviolable peace.
Hermann Hesse
Why say then Buddha never carried gun? he didn't play piano, we do not know of him making pictures either.
Suman Pokhrel
Some one asked me today to explain "Soul Mates" I said "Well if all the energy was created at the same time as they say. Then all souls and spirits and such would be the same age. The only way you could say then if your a so called Old Soul, it would mean you have played the game more than others. Then some where along the way the person your attracted to was there with you one or many times playing the game also. Yet the experiences you shared could of been in many different life applications, not just Lovers.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
There is a simple way to become buddha: When you refrain from unwholesome actions, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no designing thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Do not seek anything else.
Dōgen
when you meet that person. a person. one of your soulmates. let the connection. relationship be what it is. it may be five mins. five hours. five days. five months. five years. a lifetime. let it manifest itself, the way it is meant to. it has an organic destiny. this way if it stays or if it leaves, you will be softer from having been loved this authentically. souls come into, return, open, and sweep through your life for a myriad of reasons, let them be who and what they are meant.
Nayyirah Waheed
What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others--among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end--who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn--whom we must seek all our lives long--headlong and homesick--until the end?
Robert Nathan
Some souls are just meant to be for each other forever, and ever, and ever!
Avijeet Das
I felt I had to win. It seemed very important. I didn't know why it was important and I kept thinking, why do I think this is so important? And another part of me answered, just because it is.
Charles Bukowski
I can say I didn't win, but I can't say that I didn't try.
Maribel C. Pagan
We win some, we lose some, but there is always some.
Anthony Liccione
Love is winning the war without starting the war. (L'amour, c'est gagner la guerre - Sans commencer la guerre)
Charles de Leusse
Hopefully one day wars will only be fought in movies and may the best producer win
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Don't you go to the movies?""Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.
Charles Bukowski
It's like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking.
Charles Bukowski
of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse
Charles Bukowski
Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true—life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.
Tao Lin
A bouquet yellow like remorse Hurts my view The cage The wheel The vile ennui of all mankind And no one no one to break my chains!("Outcries")
Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen
Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.
Novalis
Moderation is the key to old age and the doorway to boredom
Benny Bellamacina
What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death?
François Mauriac
I am stuck in traffic in a taxicabwhich is typicaland not just of modern life
Frank O'Hara
She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow.
D.H. Lawrence
Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you'll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, "Believe your pain." This awful bear is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp.
Joseph Brodsky
Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else in some other way, in some other world; weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that's what eternity is. It's not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it's also the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self.
Pessoa Fernando
And allow me again to assure you that when you've got yourself going, doing your True Will, you won't find you have any time to get bored.
Aleister Crowley