Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in partnership.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.
While we are living in the present, we must celebrate life every day, knowing that we are becoming history with every work, every action, every deed.
Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.
I can never see fashion models, lean angular cheeks, strutting hips and blooming hair, without thinking of the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru.
All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.
How amazing it is to be alive Anyone who lives and breathes and puts both feet on the ground, What possible reason could he have for envying the gods
Religion stalks across the face of human history, knee-deep in the blood of innocents, clasping its red hands in hymns of praise to an approving God.
God has appointed us captains of this our bodily fort, which, without treason to that majesty, are never to be delivered over till they are demanded.
I do not like candy. I do not like knocking on strangers' doors. I do not like having to deal with the candy disaster that is Halloween. I resent it.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead.
If family religion were duly attended to and properly discharged, I think the preaching of the Word would not be the common instrument of conversion.
Our very business is to teach the great lesson of self-denial and humility to our people, and how unfit is it then that we should be proud ourselves!
A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.
Firmness in enduring and exertion is a character I always wish to possess. I have always despised the whining yelp of complaint and cowardly resolve.
Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight
I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.
Feed him ye must, whose food fills you. And that this pleasure is like raine, Not sent ye for to drowne your paine, But for to make it spring againe.
The grave is but the threshold of eternity. What a world were this, how unendurable its weight, If they whom death hath sundered, did not meet again!
A fastidious taste is like a squeamish appetite; the one has its origin in some disease of the mind, as the other has in some ailment of the stomach.
Looking at my life I see that only Love Has been my soul’s companion From deep inside My soul cries out: Do not wait, surrender For the sake of Love.
Your way begins at the other side. Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now.
Some nights stay up till dawn, as the moon sometimes does for the sun. Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way of a well, then lifted out into light.
When thou seest thine enemy in trouble, curl not thy whiskers in contempt; for in every bone there is marrow, and within every jacket there is a man.
Now seen...now gone, The butterfly flits in and out Through fence-hung flowers; But a life lived so close to them I envy...though it's here and gone.
Paris strikes the vulgar part of us infinitely the most, but to a thinking mind London is incomparably the most delightful subject for contemplation.
But the day is spent; And stars are kindling in the firmament, To us how silent--though like ours, perchance, Busy and full of life and circumstance.
The fastidious taste will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers seem to have affected.
Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.
In the central place of every heart, there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, you are young.
No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love.
Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.
She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.
What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love.
Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.
To the mass of mankind - meaning also womankind - marriage may be the only possible thing; but to the individual, it may be the one thing impossible.
I think ideas should be flying about and banging into each other. It is a kind of energy. If you occupy static positions, then things sort of ossify.
time never stops, but does it end? and how many livesbefore take-off, before we find ourselves beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.
Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
On I’ll pass, dragging my huge love behind me. On what feverish night, deliria-ridden, by what Goliaths was I begot – I, so big and by no one needed?