Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That very law which moulds a tear And bids it trickle from its source,- That law preserves the earth a sphere, And guides the planets in their course.
And the Sabbath bell, That over wood and wild and mountain dell Wanders so far, chasing all thoughts unholy With sounds most musical, most melancholy.
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
Of no agenor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.
Call not that man wretched, who whatever else he suffers as to pain inflicted, or pleasure denied, has a child for whom he hopes and on whom he doats.
Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action.
To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
Also because I'm ambiguously ethnic looking, you know, I come to New York and I can be anything. People generally think I'm half of whatever they are.
Self-realisation means that we have been consciously connected with our source of being. Once we have made this connection, then nothing can go wrong.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.
The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man.
The capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support.
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!
All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.
To succeed [,] consider what is as though it were past, deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it. If you no longer believe, enlarge the temple.
They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.
Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever - even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body
Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live with it.
Because the priest must have like every dog his day Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon, We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
There once was an old man of Lyme who married three wives at a time when asked, 'Why a third?' he replied 'One's absurd! and bigamy, sir, is a crime!'
The Cross! There, and there only (though the deist rave, and the atheist, if Earth bears so base a slave); There and there only, is the power to save.
Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oftenest in what least we dread; Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow.
This cabin, Mary, in my sight appears, Built as it has been in our waning years, A rest afforded to our weary feet, Preliminary to - the last retreat.
Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
He is the half part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such as she; And she a fair divided excellence, Whose fullness of perfection lies in him.
O Ceremony, show me but thy worth? What is thy soul of adoration? Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form, Creating awe and fear in other men?
Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has; but I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.
I believe in instinct, not reason. When reason is right, nine times out of ten it is impotent, and when it prevails, nine times out of ten it is wrong.
I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.
Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.
My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
But on one man's soul it hath broken, / A light that doth not depart; / And his look, or a word he hath spoken, / Wrought flame in another man's heart.
My life is like a music-hall,Where, in the impotence of rage,Chained by enchantment to my stall,I see myself upon the stageDance to amuse a music-hall.
The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it's like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.
The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.
There's not a wind but whispers of thy name; And not a flow'r that grows beneath the moon, But in its hues and fragrance tells a tale Of thee, my love.
I choose to politely ask myself to step aside if I am in my own way. If I do not get out of my way, I choose to call a friend who will have me removed.
On hearing about powerful love, respond, be moved like an aesthete. Only, fortunate as you've been, remember how much your imagination created for you.
It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.