Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Poets - Page 18
Explore popular quotes by famous poets.
Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.
Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
I was just so surprised at the impeccable images I had in my head that I just had to express them in some sort of physical matter.
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
Follow love and it will flee, flee love and it will follow thee.
The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
Music fathoms the sky.
Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
I know you think this world is too dark to even dream in color, but I’ve seen flowers bloom at midnight. I’ve seen kites fly in gray skies and they were real close to looking like the sunrise, and sometime it takes the most wounded wings the most broken things to notice how strong the breeze is, how precious the flight.
I don't mind being criticized. I enjoy being criticized personally, not by rumor.
Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.
Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.
You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.
Sure, men like a challenge - but so do women. And nobody likes to be challenged all the time. I know plenty of long-standing happy couples who slept together right away, spent hours yakking on the phone, split checks down the middle, and lived together for years before the wedding.
He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.
The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.
Be England what she will, with all her faults she is my country still.
What is a kiss? Why this, as some approve: The sure, sweet cement, glue, and lime of love.
Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.
It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.
All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
... where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be.
I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
The guilty think all talk is of themselves.
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
The sufficiency of merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient.
Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!
We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.
I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each evening around six o' clock, the soldiers on each side do these amazing high-stepping peacock march-offs (like a dance-off). The displays are almost identical on each side and thousands gather to watch them. Though they're patrolling along their separate borders, what comes across is how similar they are.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else's face.
History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'
We loved with a love that was more than love.
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
A fool and his words are soon parted.
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
Everything passes, nothing remains. Understand this, loosen your grip and fine serenity.
Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness. Let go. Let Be. See through everything and be free, complete, luminous, at home -- at ease.
The traveller with empty pockets will sing in the thief 's face.
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
