Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Poets - Page 19

I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.

If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.

If you want to be loved, be lovable.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

Send a bouquet of your face with the morning breeze.

Poetry is life distilled.

The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss of blankets.

Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.

A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still, and it will die of itself.

The man who is most aggressive in teaching tolerance is the most intolerant of all: he wants a world full of people too timid and ashamed to really disagree with anything.

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.

It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

I like to have a martini/Two at the very most/After three I'm under the table/After four I'm under my host.

There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.

Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

Stolen kisses are always sweetest.

I think that, as you get older, you want to be freer rather than more bound.

Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, nor care beyond today.

We begin to change the dynamic of our relationships as we are able to share our reactions to others without holding them responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices & actions. We are responsible for our own behavior and we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

The deepest words of the wise man teach us the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

The sole equality on earth is death.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

The first and most important thing a man should keep away from is not doing harm of any kind knowingly to anyone, at any time.

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.

It's hard to choose the right word, the right line. This Body Mystery is a small book, but it took me over ten years.

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

The fall of dropping water wears away the Stone.

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.

Flowers are without hope. Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.

Simplicity is natures first step, and the last of art.

Man has no greater enemy than himself.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

The groundwork of all happiness is health.

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I but when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by.

A vision is like an oasis in a desert. You can't have it all the time, as you need to keep on continuing your journey through the desert of life experiences, full of faith trials... I am not so concerned about waiting for a vision to appear because I know it will come to me when I least expect it... I still do have visions that inspire my work.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

An open foe may prove a curse, but a pretended friend is worse.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two - is gone.

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.

Learn how to listen as things speak for themselves.

My ancestors include Monahwee, who was one of the leaders in the Red Stick War, which was the largest Indian uprising in history, and Osceola, who refused to sign a treaty with the United States.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.