Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People ask me a lot, 'what can one person do,' and I say 'I'm not really sure what one person can due except come together with other people.'
When I first started, my songs were the politics of anger. As I got older and hopefully wiser, I wanted to be part of the politics of answers.
All women speak two languages: the language of men and the language of silent suffering. Some women speak a third, the language of queens.
dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.
On God for all events depend; You cannot want when God's your friend. Weigh well your part and do your best; Leave to your Maker all the rest.
To maintain your marriage brimming, with really like in the wedding cup, anytime you are incorrect, admit it each time you're proper, shut up.
I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.
Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too.
I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused.
Sounds of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain awaken'd flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass
It is manifest that all government of action is to be gotten by knowledge, and knowledge best, by gathering many knowledges, which is reading.
It is by no means a fact that death is the worst of all evils; when it comes it is an alleviation to mortals who are worn out with sufferings.
In the silence that is his chosen medium of communication and telling others about it in words. Is there no way not to be the sport of reason?
You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.
If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.
What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things
If you do not see yourselves and all things as living, moving, and having their being in God, you see nothing, whatever you may think you see.
We live not in our moments or our years: The present we fling from us like the rind Of some sweet future, which we after find Bitter to taste.
What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?
Sometimes I think that all mankind exist but to be bought and sold: The rich man's paramour is gold, the poor man's goddess, gold, gold, gold.
It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
Wander at will, Day after day,-- Wander away, Wandering still-- Soul that canst soar! Body may slumber: Body shall cumber Soul-flight no more.
It 's guid to be merry and wise, It 's guid to be honest and true, It 's guid to support Caledonia's cause, And bide by the buff and the blue.
For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.
As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.
How beautiful is night! A dewy freshness fills the silent air; No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain, Breaks the serene of heaven.
That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
Don't run away from grief, o’ soul/ Look for the remedy inside the pain/ because the rose came from the thorn/ and the ruby came from a stone.
I was once like you, enlightened and "rational", I too scoffed at lovers, Now I am drunk, crazed, thin with misery. No one is safe! Watch out.
This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe.
The drum of the realization of the promise is beating, we are sweeping the road to the sky. Your joy is here today, what remains for tomorrow?
Any wine will get you high. Judge like a king, and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with fear, or some urgency about "what's needed."
Oh! death will find me, long before I tire Of watching for you; and swing me suddenly Into the shade and loneliness and mire Of the last land!
Mud unto mud!--Death eddies near-- Not here the appointed End, not here! But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, Is wetter water, slimier slime!
Love is the natural condition of all experience before thought has divided it into a multiplicity and diversity of objects, selves and others.
When feeling is divested of the feeler and the felt, it shines as love; when seeing is divested of the seer and the seen, it shines as beauty.
The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.
The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.
A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.
Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.
There in the windy flood of morning Longing lifted its weight from me, Lost as a sob in the midst of cheering, Swept as a sea-bird out to sea.
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.
I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.
[F]rank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants.