Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The homeland affects you directly: it affects your body; it affects the collective mind and the collective heart and the collective spirit.
There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.
If you run into trouble doing what's expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see?
One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.
And that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.
Then a lawyer said, But what of our laws, master? And he answered: 'You delight in laying down laws. Yet you delight more in breaking them.
Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop--you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.
I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.
If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway.
Enthusiasm is the divine particle in our composition: with it we are great, generous, and true; without it, we are little, false, and mean.
Suicide and antipathy to fires in a bedroom seem to be among the national characteristics. Perhaps the same moral cause may originate both.
All the birds have flown up and gone; A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. We never tire of looking at each other - Only the mountain and I.
I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.
I am 33 years old, and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is, too; maybe our muddles are concurrent.
What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.
Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.
I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.
We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name.
Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.
If you love the planet or the neighborhood - you're finding ways to satisfy the soul of the planet or satisfy the soul of the neighborhood.
Investing now in safe-guarding people by helping them to adapt to climate change, will help save money and lives while building resilience.
In the '80s, Ronald Reagan inspired me to become politicized, because I grew up in that era when everything I cared about was under attack.
I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.
A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.
Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.
Some primal termite knocked on wood. And tasted it, and found it good. And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlor floor today.
Some hate broccoli, some hate bacon I hate having my picture taken. How can your family claim to love you And then demand a picture of you?
Even when I cannot write, I know I am still a writer, just the way I know I am still sexual even if I have not had a lover for many months.
The people need poetry that will be their own secret To keep them awake forever, And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.
If we but give it time, a work of art 'can rap and knock and enter our souls' and re-align us - all our molecules - to make us whole again.
This is the divine moment when we can hold the fairest blossom of spring in one hand and the sweetest flowers of early summer in the other.
Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.
It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
And bid them love each other and be blest: And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, - for I am Love's.
And long shall timorous fancy see The painted chief, and pointed spear, And Reason's self shall bow the knee To shadows and delusions here.
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.
I think true love is never blind, / But rather brings an added light; / An inner vision quick to find / The beauties hid from common sight.
Come up, April, though the valley, / In your robes of beauty drest, / Come and wake your flowery children / From their wintry beds of rest.
Books were put out, and 'had a run,' / Like coinage from the mint; / But which could fill the place of one, / That one they wouldn't print?
Of the good things given between man and man, I say that a neighbor, true and loving in heart, to neighbor is a joy beyond all things else.
Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.
Jews and Muslims 'dialoguing' has nothing to do with Palestine. The problem is settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation, not religion.
A holy and heavenly life is a continual pain to the consciences of sinners around you and continually solicits them to change their course.
O soul, be patient: thou shalt find A little matter mend all this; Some strain of music to thy mind, Some praise for skill not spent amiss.