Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A young critic is like a boy with a gun; he fires at every living thing he sees. He thinks only of his own skill, not of the pain he is giving.
We see but dimly through the mists and vapors; Amid these earthly damps What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps.
Man is never watchful enough against dangers that threaten him every hour. [Lat., Quid quisque vitet nunquam homini satis Cautum est in horas.]
Though you strut proud of your money, yet fortune has not changed your birth. [Lat., Licet superbus ambules pecuniae, Fortuna non mutat genus.]
Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
Were I to write what I know, the book would be too sensational to print, but were I to write what I think proper, it would be too dull to read.
how seasonably leaf and blossom uncurl and living things arrange their death, while someone from afar off blows birthday candles for the world.
Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.
We are told to walk noiselessly through the world, that we may waken neither hatred, nor envy; but, alas! what can we do when they never sleep!
Nothing is so oppressive as a secret: women find it difficult to keep one long; and I know a goodly number of men who are women in this regard.
When our thoughts are born, Though they be good and humble, one should mind How they are reared, or some will go astray And shame their mother.
I throw a kiss across the sea, I drink the winds as drinking wine, And dream they all are blown from thee, I catch the whisper'd kiss of thine.
Take here the grand secret; if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none, and court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion.
So I cradle this average violin that knows Only forgotten showtunes, but argues The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain.
Welcome, thou kind deceiver! Thou best of thieves; who, with an easy key, Dost open life, and, unperceived by us, Even steal us from ourselves.
Sure there is none but fears a future state; And when the most obdurate swear they do not, Their trembling hearts belie their boasting tongues.
And sweet and far as from a star, replied a voice which shall not cease, till drowning all the noise of war, it sings the blessed song of peace
And light is mingled with the gloom, And joy with grief; Divinest compensations come, Through thorns of judgment mercies bloom In sweet relief.
New every morning is the love Our waking and uprising prove, Through sleep and darkness safely brought, Restored to life and power and thought.
Wherefore did he [God] create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?
It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.
I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.
I learned to be with myself rather than avoiding myself with limiting habits; I started to be aware of my feelings more, rather than numb them.
The naked earth is warm with Spring, And with green grass and bursting trees Leans to the sun's kiss glorying, And quivers in the sunny breeze.
I'm sort of annoyed that some very basic things about poetic forms were not conveyed to me in the various poetry courses I took over the years.
Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.
Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.
Everyone will be happier if fewer women are tied to abusive men, drop out of school, and live impoverished lives because of a random pregnancy.
Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic, Venus, the white queen, the universal matrix, Down to the molecular hexagons and carbon-chains.
Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience, finds in nature the 'correspondences' through which we may know our boundless selves.
If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul.
You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.
The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.
From compromise and things half done, Keep me with stern and stubborn pride; And when at last the fight is won, God, keep me still unsatisfied.
... we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true.
Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
God pity the tortured hearts that will pant through this night! And the agony of the poor wife who has heard that her husband is really killed!
Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away.
The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.
When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.
On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do that and teach and raise a kid and paint the house.
My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.
the universe and its beings are a complementarity of empty infinity, intimate interrelationships, and total uniqueness of each and every being.
Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end.
[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .