Quotes by Poets - Page 97

My fame will outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon.
Raymond Roussel
Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Fame turns out to be a powerful instrument of grace because it humbles its chosen victims in a hurry. You sail into it, your canvas swelled with grandiosity, and when your fifteen minutes are over and you are becalmed, you realize that grandiosity cannot take you where you need to go.Only then do you learn to row like hell, asking God for the strength to stay afloat.
Erica Jong
When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into rivers of the blood of cannon-blasted bodies.
Comte de Lautréamont
Television isn't any longer the only way to fame, all you need is the internet to break into the game
Stanley Victor Paskavich
A friend of mine, Warren Lemming, has this theory: if you’re famous, it’s as if you’ve got a golden monkey on your shoulder. When people come up to talk to you, they just see the monkey.
Heathcote Williams
Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work.
Dejan Stojanovic
To be the cynosure of all eyes, do the extraordinary when you are least expected.
Ogwo David Emenike
When we were young, not so long agoFame was my favorite television show,Lydia brought out the dancer in you and me,There was Coco, Holly and Shorofsky,Glued to my set to watch them dance and actLeroy was my favorite dancer on that setCleo really won my heart; she later rose to “Fame”I will never forget Irene Cara’s song “Remember My Name
Charmaine J.Forde
Innocent like the first dreamsA few words dropped on the paper;Contaminated they were by the surrounding air,Fame swarmed, naivety disappeared!
Neelam Saxena Chandra
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
Erica Jong
a generation:the black night gave me black eyesstill I use them to seek the light
Gu Cheng
While you’re alive there’s no time for minor amazements.
Alice Fulton
He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.
Michael Ondaatje
What can you do when everyone around you is strong and clever?
Tarjei Vesaas
Your only chance of survival, if you are severely smitten, lies in hiding this fact from the woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! Love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that's what men, normally, call love.
Michel Houellebecq
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
Kahlil Gibran
A sneer is the weapon of the weak.
James Russell Lowell
Anything cracked will shatter at a touch.
Ovid
Night is the sleep of seven wax mothsDawn is the singing of five mermaidsNoon is the scratching of three field miceDusk is the shadow of a crow
Xi Chuan
There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life.
Charles Bukowski
You cannot study the same day of a test, and expect to do your very best.
Charmaine J.Forde
The day will happenwhether or not you get up
John Ciardi
Each day has a color, a smell.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
She didn't have an answer for that. People like her only ever have questions.
Steven Herrick
It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.
Margaret Atwood
There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.
Barbara Kingsolver
A wise man’s questions contain half the answer.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with.Tell me why you loved them,then tell me why they loved you. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling good.I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling bad.I wanna know the first person who taught you your beautycould ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass.See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living.I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving,and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes.I wanna know if you bleed sometimesfrom other people’s wounds,and if you dream sometimesthat this life is just a balloon —that if you wanted to, you could pop,but you never would‘cause you’d never want it to stop.If a tree fell in the forestand you were the only one there to hear —if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound,would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist,or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness?
Andrea Gibson
I am filled with wonderings, questions and doubt,but of one thing I am certain: it will always be youthat gives flight to the butterflies inside me;calm to the sea I have become and hope to the darkness all around us.It is you and it has always been you...you.
Tyler Knott Gregson
Any historian knows...that possibilities and history are connected. It's not simply our hard work, but that we lived in circumstances in which prosperity wasn't taken away. For most people, for most of history, it's not true that religion, work and love have led to successful, happy lives. Instability, fear, disease, and war are so much more common that our lives are tremendous exceptions. Isn't that miraculous?
Mark Wallace
Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness
Herman Melville
God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman. ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections. ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature!
Knut Hamsun
To be modest in speaking truth is hypocrisy. TM-ST-95
Kahlil Gibran
... it's pointless to think in moral terms when everything is permissible. We have become the people we detest. We have lost the capacity to imagine what is forbidden We have been freed, in other words, from our own hypocrisy.
Eric Gamalinda
The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets.
John Mark Green
Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.
Margaret Atwood
Fear not the phantom of death, My Countrymen, for his greatnessAnd mercy will refuse to approachYour smallness; and dread not the Dagger, for it will decline to beLodged in your shallow hearts.
Kahlil Gibran
How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.
Margaret Atwood
We go from disappointment to disappointment, from hope to denial, from expectation to surrender, as we grow older, thinking or coming to think that what was wrong was the wanting, so intense it hurt us, and believing or coming to believe that hope was our mistake and expectation our error, and that everything the more we want it the more difficult the having it seems to be.
Alfred Hayes
She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
Thomas Hardy
Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.
Thomas Hardy
Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment.
Maggie Nelson
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
W.B. Yeats
All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.
Hermann Hesse
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.
Arthur Rimbaud
Last night I missed two free throws which would have won the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the "Indians," and I'm probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot.This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.
Sherman Alexie
Basketball Rule #4If you missenough of life'sfree throwsyou will payin the end.
Kwame Alexander
When we're down and the momentum is stacked against us. Those are the moments when we find out what we're made of. When we learn to trust and lean on each other.
Charles Martin
Middle Tennessee? Really? My bracket is more busted than Screech's face during puberty.
William Shakespeare
Basketball Rule #6A great teamhas a good scorerwith a teammatewho's on pointand readyto assist.
Kwame Alexander
I see great things in baseball.
Walt Whitman
I'd only seen Julius play a few times, but he had that gift, that grace, those fingers like a goddamn medicine man. One time, when the tribal school traveled to Spokane to play this white high school team, Julius scored sixty-seven points and the Indians won by forty.I didn't know they'd be riding horses," I heard the coach of the white team say when I was leaving....Hey," I asked Adrian. "Remember Silas Sirius?"Hell," Adrian said. "Do I remember? I was there when he grabbed that defensive rebound, took a step, and flew the length of the court, did a full spin in midair, and then dunked that fucking ball. And I don't mean it looked like he flew, or it was so beautiful it was almost like he flew. I mean, he flew, period."I laughed, slapped my legs, and knew that I believed Adrian's story more as it sounded less true.Shit," he continued. "And he didn't grow no wings. He just kicked his legs a little. Held that ball like a baby in his hand. And he was smiling. Really. Smiling when he flew. Smiling when he dunked it, smiling when he walked off the court and never came back. Hell, he was still smiling ten years after that.
Sherman Alexie
Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I'd never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest.
Stuart Dybek
Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?
Barbara Kingsolver
Son, it’s easy tae be guid oan a fu’ belly. It’s when a man’s goat two bites an’ wan o’ them he’ll share, ye ken whit he’s made o’. Listen. In ony country in the world, who are the only folk that ken whit it’s like tae leeve in that country? The folk at the boattom. The rest can a’ kid themselves oan. They can afford to hiv fancy ideas. We canny, son. We loass the wan idea o’ who we are, we’re deid. We’re wan anither. Tae survive, we’ll respect wan anither. When the time comes, we’ll a’ move forward thegither, or nut at all.
William McIlvanney
Everybody knows that the dice are loadedEverybody rolls with their fingers crossedEverybody knows the war is overEverybody knows the good guys lostEverybody knows the fight was fixedThe poor stay poor, the rich get richThat's how it goesEverybody knows
Leonard Cohen
Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists.
Jorge Luis Borges