A Quote by Robert Hass

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are. — © Robert Hass
Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.
I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.
There is no doubt in my mind that as central banks begin to abandon the dollar, there will be an enormous amount of monetary demand for silver and the silver ratio will plummet. If you look at all of the monetary crises over the last 100 years, any time that there has been even a whiff of a collapse of the dollar, the silver ratio has soared.
The biggest income we make is from live performances, without any doubt. That's about a 4-to-1 ratio from anything else.
Any filmmaker, big directors, and I'm not dropping any names - I actually have couple names I want to say, but I will not - we have a ratio. Each thing you repeat, my ratio is one to four.Actually some people are ratio one to 34. I know couple directors, big directors, they are just shooting over and over.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
I'm in a body, and when my sleep ends, I'm awake. I don't really understand the... that's not really a choice. I mean unless I chose to stay in bed, but I'd still be awake.
There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.
Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.
There is no doubt that the issue of race is always present in American politics and in the politics of any multiracial society. There is also no doubt that for some people it is an element in the manifested hostility to Obama. But I don't think it is the major theme at all. Obama is right when he reminds people: By the way, I was black before the election.
Doubt can motivate you, so don't be afraid of it. Confidence and doubt are at two ends of the scale, and you need both. They balance each other out.
But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.
I just said let's get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too. Some Latino poets who barely speak English and Asian poets who can't believe how discriminated against they are. It was luck nad being in the right place. I wasn't saying nothing somebody else wasn't saying but they wouldn't hear it from them.
In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.
Economics is a theoretical science and as such abstains from any judgement of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at. It is a science of the means to be applied for attainment of ends chosen, not, to be sure, a science of the choosing of ends. Ultimate decisions, the valuations and the choosing of ends, are beyond the scope of any science. Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.
If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering.
It's better to throw a theoretically poorer pitch whole-heartedly, than to throw the so-called right pitch with feeling of doubt-doubt that's it's right, or doubt that you can make it behave well at that moment. You've got to feel sure you're doing the right thing-sure that you want to throw the pitch you're going to throw.
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