Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
Working with anyone is easy as long as you realise that your collaborator has the understanding and experience even if he is younger to you.
A birthday:-and now a day that rose With much of hope, with meaning rife- A thoughtful day from dawn to close: The middle day of human life.
As a man's salutations, so is the total of his character; in nothing do we lay ourselves so open as in our manner of meeting and salutation.
Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.
He is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other.
Whoever heard a man of fortune in England talk of the necessaries of life? . . . Whether we can afford it or no, we must have superfluities.
Look round, the wrecks of play behold; Estates dismember'd, mortgaged, sold! Their owners now to jails confin'd, Show equal poverty of mind.
Oh, for boyhood's painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor's rules, knowledge never learned of schools.
What a strange thing it is to recognize a sound like the shriek of a wounded animal, when you've never heard the shriek of a wounded animal.
By a certain fate, great acts, and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honoring each other in the same ages.
Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view.
It's not just that I'm stupid; it's that I'm just smart enough to know how stupid I am. I wish I weren't so stupid. Or that I were stupider.
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
When I have something to work against, it liberates my imagination. I believe very much in authentic inspiration. I'm not about calculation.
My mother was a washerwoman - or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas... in Plano, Texas - who always loved poetry and always loved stories.
My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile.
When we learn new behaviors and break through to higher levels of consciousness and love, we can fulfill the deeper spiritual hunger within.
Examples of vicious courses practiced in a domestic circle corrupt more readily and more deeply when we behold them in persons in authority.
The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. She who loves roses must be patient and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.
joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
He who has not looked on Sorrow will never see Joy. [for without sorrow how would you know what joy is? Contrast provides peceptive clarity]
Seven times have I despised my soul: The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.
We who love Him beheld Him with these our eyes which He made to see; and we touched Him with these our hands which He taught to reach forth.
Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.
I dream a world... where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!
One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.
It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.
If you find something to tell, tell it to your truest, though that make little to tell; the truer you speak, the more you will know to tell.
... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.
This is the truth as I see it, my dear, Out in the wind and the rain: They who have nothing have little to fear, Nothing to lose or to gain.
There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.
Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.
I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
In home life contentment is an essential to daily comfort. One discontented person in the house creates an atmosphere fatal to tranquillity.
It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles... It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again.
If your slave commits a fault, do not smash his teeth with your fists; give him some of the (hard) biscuit which famous Rhodes has sent you.
If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own.
Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.
Those gifts are ever the most acceptable which the giver makes precious. [Lat., Acceptissima semper munera sunt auctor quae pretiosa facit.]
It is more important to let a child's imagination develop than it is to labor to inculcate in him or her some correct ethical point of view.