Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ye who made war that your ships Should lay to at the beck of no nation, Make war now on Murder, that slips The leash of her hounds of damnation; Ye who remembered the Alamo, Remember the Maine!
You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.
It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case.
Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went- Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament. But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.
In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.
My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.
I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.
My dear heart, never think you are better than others. Listen to their sorrows with compassion. If you want peace, don't harbor bad thoughts, do not gossip and don't teach what you do not know.
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not of the East, nor of the West.... My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.
Listen my love, illumination is eternal. Now is always evolving. As there are billions of stars, there are billions of steps. As there are billions of souls, there are billions of ways to grow.
When you find yourself with the Beloved, embracing for one breath, in that moment you will find your true destiny. Alas, don't spoil this precious moment. Moments like this are very, very rare.
Return from existence to nonexistence. You are seeking the Lord and you belong to him. Nonexistence is a place of income; flee it not. This existence of more and less is a place of expenditure.
Love is the ark appointed for the righteous, Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.
The way the Beloved can fit in my heart, two thousand lives could fit in this body of mine. One kernel could contain a thousand bushels, and a hundred worlds pass through the eye of the needle.
Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.
I believe that if you don't want to do anything, then sit there and don't do it, but don't expect people to hand you a corn beef sandwich and wash your socks for you and unzip your fly for you.
I think writing is really a process of communication. . . . It's the sense of being in contact with people who are part of a particular audience that really makes a difference to me in writing.
Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds, Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity. But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds, This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.
It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell-tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.
I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.
Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.
My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.
THIS dust was once the Man, / Gentle, plain, just and resolute—under whose cautious hand, / Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, / Was saved the Union of These States.
A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.
For I dance And drink and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength and breath And the want Of thought is death Then am I A happy fly If I live Or if I die
Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.
Fhairshon had a son, Who married Noah's daughter, And nearly spoil'd to Flood, By trinking up ta water: Which he would have done, I at least believe it, Had ta mixture peen Only half Glenlivet.
On what does the Christian argument for Immortality really rest? It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical Christianity-the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee! . . . . . . Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart: So didst thou travel on life's common way In cheerful godliness.
I think the end is endless. It's either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it's totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn't understand it.
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.
Great oaks grow from little acorns. He has a green thumb. He has green fingers. He's sowing his wild oats. Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand.
Court-virtues bear, like gems, the highest rate, Born where Heav'n influence scarce can penetrate. In life's low vale, the soil the virtues like, They please as beauties, here as wonders strike.
Walk in this faithless grass with studious tread, Lest mice, weasels, germane beasts, too soon The tall hat and eyes, the fierce feet, for dead Descry, and fix you prone in their revelling moon.
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance. [The ability to focus on positives and distract your mind from negatives for at least a time is a necessary skill for being happy.]
Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.
I think it's really hard to be joyful. I work hard at it. I always feel like it's a choice. You can be joyful or you can be depressed, and there just doesn't seem to be any future in depression.
Who thinks, at night, that morn will ever be? Who knows, far out upon the central sea, That anywhere is land? And yet, a shore Has set behind us, and will rise before: A past foretells a future.
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
People want something that's relevant to their lives. They want something that means something to them, and they want something where it seems like people have thought about what they're saying.
I tend to write poetry that is rich in data of various sorts. The lyric poem isn't perfectly suited to accommodating such data, so I've had to find new ways to say everything that I want to say.
My mind's sunk so low, Claudia, because of you, wrecked itself on your account so bad already, that I couldn't like you if you were the best of women, -or stop loving you, no matter what you do.