Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, - a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field.
True faith nor biddeth nor abideth form, The bended knee, the eye uplift; is all Which men need render; all which God can bear. What to the faith are forms? A passing speck, A crow upon the sky.
A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.
Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?
Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.
We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.
But if there be an hereafter,And that there is, conscience, uninfluenc'dAnd suffer'd to speak out, tells every man,Then must it be an awful thing to die;More horrid yet to die by one's own hand.
What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up, And be discharged, and straight wound up anew? No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets: May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.
Our lives laid down in war and peace may not Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight. And that they may be is the only prayer Worth praying. May my sacrifice Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight.
The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?
Let us depart! the universal sun Confines not to one land his blessed beams; Nor is man rooted, like a tree, whose seed, the winds on some ungenial soil have cast there, where it cannot prosper.
Listen - life is really going on, right now, around us. Do you see it? Sometimes I lose it but if I sit still and listen, it comes back, and then I think, How funny, this is what being alive is.
Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.
Nearness to God is common to us all, Because we're all created and sustained by God, But only the authentically noble Possess and live that nearness That's a constant upswelling passion of love.
Journeys bring power and love back into you. If you can't go somewhere, move in the passageways of the self. They are like shafts of light, always changing, and you change when you explore them.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.
Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art
I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first.
The word "journal" has in its root the word jour, French for day. A journey was the distance that could be traveled in a day. A journal, therefore, consisted of the writing one recorded per day.
I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.
We look at the Mona Lisa and say we're going to do our version of the Mona Lisa. We mirror it. But exaptation would say that painting the Mona Lisa would lead to a whole new place... Bugs Bunny.
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
In harvest time, harvest folk, servants and all Should make, all together, good cheer in the hall Once ended the harvest, let none be beguiled Please such as did help thee, man, woman and child.
Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in.
I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem's adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you.
Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
My impression of Americans from the beginning is of the best, and I have never since had cause to alter my mind. They are a kind, sympathetic race of people and naturally proud of their country.
After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts - like a Chinese nest of boxes - oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front - in our ancestors, back and back until.
Very old are the woods; And the buds that break Out of the brier's boughs, When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are-- Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.
You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing, And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church, Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.
The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack.
Great offices will have great talents, and God gives to every man the virtue, temper, understanding, taste, that lifts him into life, and lets him fall just in the niche he was ordained to fill.
Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.
For now I stand as one upon a rock environed with a wilderness of sea, who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, expecting ever when some envious surge will in his brinish bowels swallow him.
The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night.
I have lived long enough. My way of life is to fall into the sere, the yellow leaf, and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have.
All lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform; vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
The monumental pomp of age Was with this goodly personage; A stature undepressed in size, Unbent, which rather seemed to rise In open victory o'er the weight Of seventy years, to loftier height.
I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom.
The word majesty was now dropped; but, with the deepest respect and humility, I was addressed as the count. What could I do? I accepted the title, and from that moment I was known as Count Peter.
There is only one really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as you like without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want it is, 'Garcon! Un Pernod!'
The Physician, by the study and inspection of urine and ordure, approves himself in the science; and in like sort should our author accustom and exercise his imagination upon the dregs of nature.
We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.
Ah, when shall all men's good Be each man's rule, and universal peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Thro' all the circle of the golden year?
It was my duty to have loved the highest; It surely was my profit had I known: It would have been my pleasure had I seen. We needs must love the highest when we see it, Not Lancelot, nor another.