Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That is the real problem of depression - a condition which will affect an estimated one in five of the population at some point in their lives. It is completely unimaginable until you have been through it.
Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental - toward yourself or another person - is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are. Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself.
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.
I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it-have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.
The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.
It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.
Stand there, damn'd meddling villain, and be silent; For if thou utt'rest but a single word, A cough or hem, to cross me in my speech, I'll send thy cursed spirit from the earth, To bellow with the damn'd!
And London shops on Christmas Eve Are strung with silver bells and flowers As hurrying clerks the City leave To pigeon-haunted classic towers, And marbled clouds go scudding by The many-steepled London sky
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy, or charms, can make us sleep as well, And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.
But hail thou Goddess sage and holy, Hail, divinest Melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, And therefore to our weaker view O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue.
Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to 'content' is like praying in swear words. End of Sermon. Back to business.
I unpetalled you, like a rose, to see your soul, and I didn't see it. But everything around -horizons of land and of seas-, everything, out to the infinite, was filled with a fragrance, enormous and alive.
Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend.
The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.
At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.
Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.
I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.
Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.
Finding voice is a socially responsible political act. We don't just do it for ourselves. And helping someone to find voice demands a spiritual partnership with that seeker. It's an exercise of compassion.
We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.
Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!
The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Maybe I wanted to have kids because you want to leave behind lessons, leave behind everything that matters to you. That's how you touch the world. But I have to reconsider what it's like to leave a legacy.
The human interest, and the natural interest, and the spiritual interest of this planet need to begin to take a priority over the corporate interest, the military interest, and the materialistic interests.
Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.
Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.
Art includes everything which stimulates the desire to live; science includes everything which sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.
From the age of six I wanted to be an artist. At that point I meant a painter, but it turned out what I really meant was I was someone who was very interested in watching the world and making copies of it.
Frederick Turner comes across in his poems as a man of impressively broad experience, intellectual brilliance, and originality. … He’s at his best when he unleashes his extraordinary powers of observation.
The reason artists show so little interest In public freedom is because the freedom They've come to feel the need of is a kind No one can give them they can scarce attain The freedom of their own material.
As for us, He has appointed the job of permanent unemployment. If he wanted us to work, after all, He would not have created this wine. With a skinfull of this, Sir, would you rush out to commit economics?
Hear this if you can: If you want to reach him You have to go beyond yourself And when you finally arrive at the land of absence Be silent Don’t say a thing Ecstasy, not words, is the language spoken there
There cannot be self-restraint in the absence of desire: when there is no adversary, what avails thy courage? Hark, do not castrate thyself, do not become a monk: chastity depends on the existence of lust.
Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.
Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means.
The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.
As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?" Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.
What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.
Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.
Let them make their war. Whence come night and day? Whence will the eagle become gray? Whence is it that night is dark? Whence is it that the linnet is green? The ebullition of the sea, How is it not seen?
Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.
Sometimes he will sit on the carpet in front of you, looking at you with eyes so melting, so caressing and so human, that they almost frighten you, for it is impossible to believe that a soul is not there.
One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.
How do we define consciousness, or what has been called the human soul or the spirit, if it can't be quantified as matter or a particle?.. It can be quantified or observed just by a process of elimination.