Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
As in smooth oil the razor best is whet, So wit is by politeness sharpest set; Their want of edge from their offence is seen, Both pain us least when exquisitely keen.
I should not like to preach to a congregation who all believed as I believe. I would as lief preach to a basket of eggs in their smooth compactness and oval formality.
There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.
I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
I have to say I like Obama a lot. His record is the best. He's always been vocal about his opposition to the war in Iraq. Frankly, he seems very good in a lot of ways.
I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
As there is no worldly gain without some loss, so there is no worldly loss without some gain.... Set the allowance against the loss, and thou shalt find no loss great.
Pleasures bring effeminacy, and effeminacy foreruns ruin; such conquests, without blood or sweat, sufficiently do revenge themselves upon their intemperate conquerors.
But lilies, stolen from grassy mold, No more curled state unfold, Translated to a vase of gold; In burning throne though they keep still Serenities unthawed and chill.
O Lord! take my heart, for I cannot give it; and when Thou hast it, O! keep it, for I cannot keep it for Thee; and save me in spite of myself, for Jesus Christ's sake.
The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.
Whenever I went to an historical moment that was sad or where something terrible happened, it was, for me, a learning moment, a teaching moment for those who survived.
No Church-yard is so handsom, that a man would desire straight to bee buried there. [No churchyard is so handsome that a man would desire straight to be buried there.]
The candle glimmers but an hour. The night Looms in its ancient hunger. Would you know The tragedy of human love and need? Gaze on the stars, then on a brother's face!
If we meet somebody who has never made a mistake, lets help them start a religion. Until then, were just going to meet other humans and help to make each other better.
All papas and mammas have exactly that sort of sight which distinguishes objects at a distance clearly, while they need spectacles to see those under their very noses.
People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.
What I saw was just one eye In the dawn as I was going: A bird can carry all the sky In that little button glowing. Never in my life I went So deep into the firmament.
When we fall asleep, we withdraw our awareness from its hypnotic fascination with physical sensation, thereby enabling us to listen with our now awakening sixth sense.
Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies! But beautiful as songs of the immortals, The holy melodies of love arise.
Whatever hath been written shall remain, Nor be erased nor written o'er again; The unwritten only still belongs to thee: Take heed, and ponder well what that shall be.
This is the absolute truth: and on this truth our tactics must be based. All tactics that are not based on this are false, and lead the proletariat to terrible defeat.
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?
There was not after all a single kind of strife, but on earth there are two kinds: one of them a man might praise when he recognized her, but the other is blameworthy.
But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe
At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw.
Socrates, when informed of some derogating speeches one had used concerning him behind his back, made only this facetious reply, "Let him beat me too when I am absent.
I know it’s stupid to not own a gun yet have so many triggers, but in some other world gigantic seashells hold humans to their ears and listen to the echo of machines.
The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past.
Beware of biting jests; the more truth they carry with them, the greater wounds they give, the greater smarts they cause, and the greater scars they leave behind them.
The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.
With our sympathy for the wrongdoer we need the old Puritan and Quaker hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin.
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown.
This is the month, and this the happy morn, wherein the Son of heaven's eternal King, of wedded Maid and Virgin Mother born, our great redemption from above did bring.
It is a very good world to live in, To lend or to spend, or to live in; but to beg or to borrow, or to get a man's own, It is the very worst world that ever was known.
The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry.
To live is nothing more than to come here to die, to be what we were before being born, but with apprenticeship, experience, knowledge of cause, and perhaps with will.
Conceptual writing is looking for that "Aha!" moment, when something so simple, right under our noses, is revealed as being awe- inspiring, profound, and transcendent.
How can I lose faith in the justice of life, when the dreams of those who sleep upon feathers are not more beautiful than the dreams of those who sleep upon the earth?
Follow your heart. Your heart is the right guide in everything big. Mine is so limited. What you want to do is determined by that divine element that is in each of us.
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
We are violets blue, For our sweetness found Careless in the mossy shades, Looking on the ground. Love's dropp'd eyelids and a kiss,-- Such our breath and blueness is.
Strange the affection which clings to inanimate objects - objects which cannot even know our love! But it is not return that constitutes the strength of an attachment.
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.