Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poetry is a break for freedom.
Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
What you plan is too small for you to live.
There is no house like the house of belonging.
Genius is becoming something you were all along.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.
Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.
The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest. It's wholeheartedness.
The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.
Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.
We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again
We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.
The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it.
But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside
Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.
To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.
Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.
The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.
To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.
The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.
When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.
Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.
Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.
Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.
Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.
I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.
It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection.
The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
What if the world is holding its breath - waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?
What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
The moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already turning towards home.
Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.
A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.
The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.
Heartbreak is how we mature... There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.