Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.