A Quote by Mahmoud Darwish

Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.

Mahmoud Darwish

Quote Topics

Poetry Against Armies Attachment Barbarity Blade Fragility Grass Grass Growing Growing Human Like March Only Resist Wall While

Quote Author

Mahmoud Darwish
Palestinian - Poet
March 13, 1941 - August 9, 2008

Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.

Norman Mailer

A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?

Carl Sagan

"Humanism" is to be human, to think, to analyze, and to probe. To respond and to be stimulated by all living things - beasts, fowl, and fishes. To respond through touch, sight, smell, and sound to all things in nature - both organic and inorganic-to colors, shapes, and textures - to not only look at a blade of grass but to really see a blade of grass. These things, to me, are what life and living are all about. I would call it "Humanism."

Jacob Lawrence

A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.

Samuel Johnson

If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.

Vincent Van Gogh

Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God's single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb. Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence.

Peter Kreeft

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

Ursula K. Le Guin

When our backs are against the wall, we must turn around and march forward.

John Major

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

James Russell Lowell

The spirit of Route 66 is in the details: every scratch on a fender, every curl of paint on a weathered billboard, every blade of grass growing up through a cracked street.

John Lasseter

Man only remains hypnotised with the false idea of an ego. When this ghost is off from us, all dreams vanish, and then it is found that the one Self only exists from the highest Being to a blade of grass.

Swami Vivekananda

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

Joan Miro

Lo and behold! God made this starry wold, The maggot and the mold; lo and behold! He taught the grass contentment blade by blade, The sanctity of sameness in a shade.

Nathalia Crane

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Keith Carter

You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?