Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All Nature is but art, unknown to thee All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.
Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life, Before a thousand peering littlenesses, In that fierce light which beats upon a throne, And blackens every blot.
Love, as is told by the seers of old, Comes as a butterfly tipped with gold, Flutters and flies in sunlit skies, Weaving round hearts that were one time cold.
There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.
We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.
The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
You can stand on the cliff of my heart and shout nothing but ‘ugly’ through me. I promise all I will echo back is ‘Beauty, beauty, you have always been beauty
It is well within the order of things That man should listen when his mate sings; But the true male never yet walked Who liked to listen when his mate talked.
Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.
Please not thyself the flattering crowd to hear; 'Tis fulsome stuff, to please thy itching ear. Survey thy soul, not what thou does appear, But what thou art.
The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.
Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable!
That punk approach of 'We don't wanna get big' is really a bourgeois thing. It's not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.
If I have a talent for making some fourth-grader who hates school and reading to hate it a little less, then I have to do the most with what I've been issued.
The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.
If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!
Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!
By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
Your parents don't give you much love, do they?' 'I don't need that stuff,' I told her. 'Henry, everybody needs love.' 'I don't need anything.' 'You poor boy.
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.
Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style . . .
How am I placing myself in the world of other people around me? For me, I feel that I am not really alone, that others can feel it too. I see art in this way.
To find happiness, it is not quite difficult thing. It is just enough to distinguish the blue of the sky from the pink of peach flowers which are opening out.
The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us alongto see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.
In Germany, they have great difficulty with anything that smacks of cultism or messianic leadership. You can't talk about leadership in its charismatic forms.
We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.
I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.
blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.
What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
Your practice should be strengthened by the difficult situations you encounter, just as a bonfire in a strong wind is not blown out, but blazes even brighter.
If one were truly aware of the value of human life, to waste it blithely on distractions and the pursuit of vulgar ambitions would be the height of confusion.
The artist will have had his revenge for being made to wait, A revenge not only necessary but right and clever-- Simply to leave him out of the scene forever.
A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs.
Chastity prays for me, piety sings, Innocence sweetens my last black breath, Modesty hides my thighs in her wings, And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
But here in the struggle for fame and pelf I want to be able to like myself. I don't want to look at myself and know That I'm bluster and buff and empty show.
Joy may you have and gentle hearts content Of your loves couplement: And let faire Venus, that is Queene of love, With her heart-quelling Sonne upon you smile
For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.
A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.
Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.
If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.
Hath any wronged thee? be bravely revenged; slight it, and the work is begun; forgive it, and it is finished; he is below himself that is not above an injury.
A noble soul spreads even over a face in which the architectonic beauty is wanting an irresistible grace, and a often even triumphs over the natural disfavor.
What else is chance but the rude stone which receives its life from the sculptor's hand? Providence gives us chance, and man must mould it to his own designs.
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
For oute of olde feldys, as men sey, Comyth al this newe corn from yer to yere; And out of olde bokis, in good fey, Comyth al this newe science that men lere.
From a chollerick man withdraw a little; from him that saies nothing, for ever. [From a choleric man withdraw a little; from him that says nothing, for ever.]
The Indian gods are imposing, the Greek gods are not. Indeed they are not brave, not self-controlled, they have no manners, they are not gentlemen and ladies.
Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion.
It is a great feeling to know that from a window I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves. And from these gather enough dream to sneak out a back door.