My heart 's in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart 's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.
I will go to the garden. I will be a romantic. I will sell myself in hell, in heaven also I will be.
I see for Nature no defeat In one tree's overthrow Or for myself in my retreat For yet another blow.
I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.
Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.
A stubborn mind conduces as little to wisdom or even to knowledge, as a stubborn temper to happiness
Sweet as sweetest Grecian honey will my song be when I sing, O Beloved, in the season of the Spring!
I will be waiting here.... For your silence to break, For your soul to shake, For your love to wake!
Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
How can I know anything about the past or the future, when the light of the Beloved shines only Now.
When someone is counting out gold for you, don't look at your hands, or the gold. Look at the giver.
Sit with lovers and choose their state. Do not stay long with those who are not living in the heart.
This world is in deep trouble, from top to bottom. But it can be swiftly healed by the balm of love.
Purify yourself from the attributes of self, so that you may see your own pure, untarnished essence.
Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
There is no reality but God , says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings.
Why am I seeking? I am the same as he. His essence speaks through me. I have been looking for myself
Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.
There is no Love greater than Love with no object. For then you, yourself, have become love, itself.
If your thought is a rose, you are a rose garden; and if it is a thistle, you are fuel for the fire.
I turn all thorn then, but you come back again and make my thorniness fragrant and pink and petaled.
Knowest thou not the beauty of thine own face? Quit this temper that leads thee to war with thyself.
Incredibly, inordinately, devastatingly, immortally, calamitously, hearteningly, adorably beautiful.
In every art, beginners must start with models of those who have practiced the same art before them.
Use a sweet tongue, courtesy, and gentleness, and thou mayest manage to guide an elephant by a hair.
Better is the sinner who hath thoughts about God, than the saint who hath only the show of sanctity.
If thou art of elephant-strength or of lion-claw, still peace is, in my opinion, better than strife.
The march of good fortune has backward slips: to retreat one or two paces gives wings to the jumper.
Striving to tell his woes, words would not come; For light cares speak, when mighty griefs are dumb.
But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me any my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
That’s what we were told—stand up for yourself. But that’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.
Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too.
I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.
A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
So much of growing up is an unbearable waiting. A constant longing for another time. Another season.
A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.
Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.
God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality.
Look-ye, 'tis my Opinion, ev'ry Man cheats in his Way. And he is only honest, who is not discover'd.
There is no map that can show you how to leap. The map for this is somewhere in our own imagination.
Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.
I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.