Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.
Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.
For 'tis a truth well known to most, That whatsoever thing is lost, We seek it, ere it comes to light, In every cranny but the right.
Were I so tall as to reach the pole or grasp the ocean at a span, I must be measured by my soul. The mind is the standard of the man.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll; I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
Very good orators, when they are out, they will spit; and for lovers, lacking--God warn us!--matter, the cleanliest shift is to kiss.
Fair ladies, masked, are roses in their bud; Dismasked, the damask sweet commixture shown, Are angels vailing clouds, or roses blown.
That but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'ld jump the life to come.
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I ha' lost my reputation, I ha' lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial!
From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing.
Nature does require her time of preservation, which perforce, I her frail son amongst my brethren mortal, must give my attendance to.
But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd Than that which withering on the virgin thorn Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.
in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
That to this mountain-daisy's self were known The beauty of its star-shaped shadow, thrown On the smooth surface of this naked stone!
When men change swords for ledgers, and desert The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed I had, my Country--am I to be blamed?
Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness
Science appears but what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity.
Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
In thigh-high yellow leather boots Plump Saphonisba strides. Too bad that, just to hide her calves, Two calves have lost their hides.
It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.
Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.
I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.
I sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within.
A pasty costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.
Forgive my grief for one removed Thy creature whom I found so fair I trust he lives in Thee and there I find him worthier to be loved.
Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last-far off-at last, to all, And every winter change to spring.
Cold autumn, wan with wrath of wind and rain, Saw pass a soul sweet as the sovereign tune That death smote silent when he smote again.
I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.
The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.
…we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re all blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment (Sunflower Sutra)
I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.
They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.
To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Retire within thyself, and thou will discover how small a stock is there. [Lat., Tecum habita, et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex.]
Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.
If you sound great in the practice room, you're practicing the wrong thing. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time Be crushed by the spirit of light.
The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =
In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us
... to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.
We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti
I tried to write poems in rhyme. I tried writing songs. Sometimes I jotted down a thought. I would keep a log of spontaneous thoughts.
I write and I write and a lot of times I go back to the American lens, though sometimes it's a struggle to come from that perspective.
In Cambodian culture the male figure in the family is important; when you lose your husband you lose your economic ability to survive.