Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.
It's perfectly okay if you don't understand every single one of them. For one thing, I make a lot of corny jokes, and you have to be 40 years old to get some of them.
My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow.
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
Je sais la douleur est la noblesse unique O u' ne mordront jamais la terre et les enfers. I know that pain is the one nobility upon which Hell itself cannot encroach.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
How do you say a thing at all, at the end of the day? How do you say what's in your mind? And as soon as you say what you actually have in mind, it's wrong, isn't it?
I'm aware of my audience in a way, and I do try to engage with them while I'm trying to go about my business of thinking. I believe they help me by providing a focus.
The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.
I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
Other people have noticed more of an evolution than I have and so I'll try to tell you where I'm coming from and also relate it to what I think other people perceive.
I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
It turns out that, at social gatherings, as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, I rank somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.
[Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.
Though they go mad they shall be sane, though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.
Man’s wants remain unsatisfied till death. Then, when his soul is naked, is he one With the man in the wind, and the west moon, With the harmonious thunder of the sun
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
you shall above all things be glad and young For if you're young,whatever life you wear it will become you;and if you are glad whatever's living will yourself become.
They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now
I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; That every Hyacinth the Garden wears Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.
The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men; and it is the only one that rules the world.
There is never a time in a company's history when cost control can be relegated to the back burner, but for a startup company, keeping costs low is a vital necessity.
In the end, the railroads made America and nanotech will make the 21st century, and that is the end of the story. The beginning of the story and the end of the story.
See, here's a shadow found; the human nature Is made th' umbrella to the Deity, To catch the sunbeams of thy just Creator; Beneath this covert thou may'st safely lie.
Charity feeds the poor, so does pride; charity builds an hospital, so does pride. In this they differ: charity gives her glory to God; pride takes her glory from man.
Though virtue give a ragged livery, she gives a golden cognizance; if her service make thee poor, blush not. Thy poverty may disadvantage thee, but not dishonor thee.
A dog, I will maintain, is a very tolerable judge of beauty, as appears from the fact that any liberally educated dog does, in a general way, prefer a woman to a man.
There is no expeditious road To pack and label men for God, And save them by the barrel-load. Some may perchance, with strange surprise, Have blundered into Paradise.
At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.
Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.
Certain, when I was born, so long ago, Death drew the tap of life and let it flow; And ever since the tap has done its task, And now there's little but an empty cask.
Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.
Attachment has to do with suffering, so it's really close to Buddhism, because Buddhism wants to relieve you from suffering; you're supposed to escape from suffering.
Now is the time to understand That all your ideas of right and wrong Were just a child's training wheelsTo be laid aside When you finally live With veracity And love.
Jews who long have drifted from the faith of their fathers... are stirred in their inmost parts when the old, familiar Passover sounds chance to fall upon their ears.
Magnificent autumn! He comes not like a pilgrim, clad in russet weeds; not like a hermit, clad in gray; but like a warrior with the stain of blood in his brazen mail.
Many people do not allow their principles to take root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do the flowers they have planted, to see if they are growing.
We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.
The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.
His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.
One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept." That was clear to me now.
Who is a good man? He who keeps the decrees of the fathers, and both human and divine laws. [Lat., Vir bonus est quis? Qui consulta patrum, qui leges juraque servat.]
Virtue, opening heaven to those who do not deserve to die, makes her course by paths untried. [Lat., Virtus, recludens immeritis mori Coelum, negata tentat iter via.]
I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague.
Although according to certain philosophers it is quite difficult to distinguish the jester from the melancholic, life itself being a comic drama or a dramatic comedy.