Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
As all things eternal and primordial reappear, so all things mortal return to the earth. Honor, old age, probity, justice, constance, virtue, and gentleness are all gathered into the cold tomb.
If we had strength and faith enough to trust ourselves entirely to God; and follow Him simply wherever He should lead us, we should have no need of any great effort of mind to reach perfection.
Death is a mighty mediator. There all the flames of rage are extinguished, hatred is appeased, and angelic pity, like a weeping sister, bends with gentle and close embrace over the funeral urn.
In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitudes.
It is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
All this new stuff goes on top turn it over, turn it over wait and water down from the dark bottom turn it inside out let it spread through Sift down even. Watch it sprout. A mind like compost.
Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.- Robert Frost Now that all your worry has proved such an unattractive business - why not find a better job?
And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.
In earlier religions the spirit of the time was expressed through the individual and confirmed by miracles. In modern religions the spirit is expressed through the many and confirmed by reason.
You are only afriad if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!
Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.
It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more.
Cease to inquire what the future has in store, and to take as a gift whatever the day brings forth. [Lat., Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere: et Quem Fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro Appone.]
The just man having a firm grasp of his intentions, neither the heated passions of his fellow men ordaining something awful, nor a tyrant staring him in the face, will shake in his convictions.
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
Good heavens, of what un costly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.
This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
If so men's memories not a monument be, None shalt thou have. Warm hearts, and not cold stone, Must mark thy grave, or thou shalt lie, unknown. Marbles keep not themselves; how then, keep thee?
A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself.
Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.
Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.
I don't see the desert as barren at all; I see it as full and ripe. It doesn't need to be flattered with rain. It certainly needs rain, but it does with what it has, and creates amazing beauty.
My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.
Give and Take... For to the bee a flower is a fountain if life And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving is a need and an ecstasy.
I am forever walking upon these shores, Betwixt the sand and the foam, The high tide will erase my food prnts, And the wind will blow away the foam, But the sea and the shore will remain forver
Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.
"Influence" is itself influenced, coming from an Italian word for the outbreak of a disease (influenza, outbreak). Influence is that which flows across - permeates - the boundaries of the self.
And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.
Disappointment often focuses on the failure of our own agenda rather than on God's long-term purposes for us, which may use stress and struggle as tools for strengthening our spiritual muscles.
a caring that gains only when losing; an obsessed desire to be bound, for love , in jail ; a capitulation to the one you've conquered yourself; a devotion to your own assassin every single day.
Not till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"-above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." shall we have it.
This was Shakespeare's form ; Who walk'd in every path of human life, Felt every passion ; and to all mankind Doth now, will ever, that experience yield Which his own genius only could acquire.
Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.
I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.
The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails.
The Long Way HomeWhy is it when people feel they are losing each other they always leave each other?Why do people walk away from their house when all they have to do to get home is turn around?
If solid happiness we prize, Within our breast this jewel lies, And they are fools who roam. The world has nothing to bestow From our own selves our joys must flow, And that dear hut, our home.
Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious. But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. . . .
Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.
When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine.