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object:Han-shan - Poems
author class:Han-shan
subject class:Poetry
subject class:Zen

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME
1.hs_-_Heres_A_Message_for_the_Faithful
1.hs_-_I_settled_at_Cold_Mountain_long_ago,
1.hs_-_The_Road_To_Cold_Mountain

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
1.hs_-_Heres_A_Message_for_the_Faithful
1.hs_-_I_settled_at_Cold_Mountain_long_ago,
1.hs_-_The_Road_To_Cold_Mountain

PRIMARY CLASS

SIMILAR TITLES
Han-shan - Poems

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH


TERMS ANYWHERE



QUOTES [449 / 449 - 1500 / 2989]


KEYS (10k)

  426 Sri Aurobindo
   4 Douglas King
   2 Kobayashi Issa
   2 Jalaluddin Rumi
   1 Velimir Khlebnikov
   1 Taigu Ryokan
   1 Satprem
   1 Saint John of the Cross
   1 Robert Ardrey
   1 Red Hawk
   1 Louis C K
   1 Kahlil Gibran
   1 Emily Dickinson
   1 e. e. cummings
   1 E. E. Cummings
   1 Divani Shamsi Tabriz
   1 The Mother
   1 Ogawa
   1 Aleister Crowley

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

  379 Sri Aurobindo
   19 Matthea Harvey
   15 Mary Oliver
   13 Rumi
   13 James Arthur
   12 Walt Whitman
   12 Charles Bukowski
   11 Sanober Khan
   10 Denise Duhamel
   9 Edward Hirsch
   8 Cate Marvin
   8 Anonymous
   7 Shirley Geok lin Lim
   7 Anne Sexton
   7 Ally Condie
   6 Trista Mateer
   6 Stanley Kunitz
   6 Philip Larkin
   6 Pattiann Rogers
   6 Nikki Giovanni

1:I wish my life had a reset button." ~ Douglas King, quote from "poems in a minor chord,", (2017).,
2:the surface" ~ Douglas King, from his book "poems in a minor cord: including strange,", (2017) p. 170,
3:By men is mightiness achieved ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,
4:All that we meet is a symbol and gateway ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
5:instead of what I don't have the things I have would be much more cared for." ~ Douglas King, quote from "poems in a minor chord,", (2017),
6:Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
7:After 'tis cold, none heeds, none hinders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
8:leaves with
poems on them
are falling
~ Ogawa, @BashoSociety
9:No one I am, I who am all that is. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,
10:IT was for delight
He sought existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
11:My life is a throb of Thy eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity,
12:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
   We fell them down and turn them into paper,
   That we may record our emptiness.
   ~ Kahlil Gibran,
13:Beauty of our dim soul is amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us,
14:Necessity rules all the infinite world, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Birth of Sin,
15:Man's mind is the dupe of his animal self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,
16:If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain." ~ Emily Dickinson, (1830 -1886), American poet, wrote nearly 1,800 poems, Wikipedia.,
17:I am an epitome of opposites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man, the Despot of Contraries,
18:They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field. ~ Saint John of the Cross, The Poems of St. John of the Cross,
19:And all grows beautiful because Thou art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing,
20:All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
21:My body a dot in the soul's vast expanse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self's Infinity,
22:In my heart's chamber lives the unworshipped God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
23:Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
24:Necessity fashions
All that the unseen eye has beheld. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
25:The golden virgin, Usha, mother of life,
Yet virgin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
26:Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
After you know my poems are not poems,
Then we can begin to discuss poetry! ~ Taigu Ryokan,
27:Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
28:Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Thought the Paraclete,
29:To our gaze God's light is a darkness, His plan is a chaos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
30:A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
31:Alone the wise Can walk through fire with unblinking eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epigram,
32:Eviller fate there is none than life too long among mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
33:Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
34:My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self's Infinity,
35:We are the heirs of infinite widenesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Call of the Impossible,
36:Heavy is godhead to bear with its mighty sun-burden of lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
37:Heavenly voices to us are a silence, those colours a whiteness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
38:Each is a mass of forces thrown in shape. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Discoveries of Science - III,
39:Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn, the Everlasting, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
40:God still keeps
Near to a paler world the hour ere dawn ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,
41:Life's whole
Tremendous theorem is Thou complete. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
42:There is an hour for knowledge, an hour to forget and to labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
43:Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
44:And all the while within us works His love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
45:Hard are God's terms and few can meet them of men who are mortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
46:Is here and in the pleasant house He chose
To harbour God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
47:Mind is His wax to write and, written, rase
Form and name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
48:The sweet vast centre and the cave divine
Called Paradise, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
49:And in the heart of the worst the best shall be born by my wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
50:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
51:He who to some gives victory, joy and good,
To some gives rest. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
52:His good and evil, sin and virtue, till
He bids thee leave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
53:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
54:Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
55:Clouds from Zeus come and pass; his sunshine eternal survives them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
56:Two are the angels of God whom men worship, strength and enjoyment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
57:All things embrace in death and the strife and the hatred are ended. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
58:A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth's pain; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
59:But there is never any end when one has loved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
60:Man his passion prefers to the voice that guides from the immortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
61:You cannot utterly die while the Power lives untired in your bosoms; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
62:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,
63:Surely the steel grows dear in the land when a traitor can flourish." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
64:Love the sign
Of one outblaze of godhead that two share. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
65:Fearless of death they must walk who would live and be mighty for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
66:Nobler must kings be than natures of earth on whom Zeus lays no burden. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
67:Through glorious things and base the wheel of God
For ever runs. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
68:Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
69:Alike 'tis heaven,
Rule or obedience to the one heart given. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,
70:Yea, the soul of a man too is mighty
More than the stone and the mortar! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
71:All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Strong Son of Lightning,
72:The abode
Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
73:Thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
74:Credence, when mediocrity multiplied
Equals itself with genius. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,
75:The Self of things is not their outward view,
A Force within decides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,
76:Each finite is that deep Infinity
Enshrining His veiled soul of pure delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,
77:Helped are the souls that wait more than strengths soon fulfilled and exhausted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
78:young portress bright
Who opens to our souls the worlds of light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,
79:Easy are mortal
Hearts to be bent by Fate and soon we consent to our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
80:I move in an ocean of stupendous Light
Joining my depths to His eternal height. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,
81:This body which was once my universe,
Is now a pittance carried by the soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Body,
82:All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight,
O Absolute, O vivid Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Divine Sight,
83:Fate,
The dim great presence, is but nature made
Irrevocable in its fruits. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
84:Good we have made by our thoughts and sin by our fear and recoiling; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
85:If you make friends with your problems you may have a lot of company but at least you're not alone." ~ Douglas King, quote from "Poems in a Minor Chord: Including Strange,", (2017).,
86:Only the past fulfilled can conjure room to the future that presses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
87:Transmuted is ravishment's minister,
A high note and a fiery refrain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
88:A perfect face amid barbarian faces,
A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Goethe,
89:Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death-blast and storm-race. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
90:Nor punishes. Impartially he deals
To every strenuous spirit its chosen reward. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
91:A Silence that was Being's only word,
The unknown beginning and the voiceless end ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,
92:In us the secret Spirit can indite
A page and summary of the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,
93:One who has made in sport the suns and seas
Mirrors in our being his immense caprice. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,
94:Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog
Can, if He will, show equal godhead. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,
95:Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
96:The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
97:The world's deep contrasts are but figures spun
Draping the unanimity of the One. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Contrasts,
98:A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway
Upholds the mystery of this Passion-play. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,
99:Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits
The pure heart as the stained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
100:It is the Infinite's blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
101:Men are fathers of their fate;
They dig the prison, they the crown command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,
102:Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds
And metres surging with the ocean's voice ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame,
103:All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,
104:Our consciousness a torch that plays Between the Abyss and a supernal Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator,
105:A World-adventurer borne on Destiny's wing
Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,
106:No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.
Thy presence is my immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
107:The Master of man and his infinite Lover,
He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
108:To whatsoever living form I turn
I see my own body with another face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
109:As with the figure of a symbol dance
The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,
110:Hidden in an earthly garment that survives,
I am the worldless being vast and free. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Immortality,
111:Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,
112:Each finite thing I see is a façade;
From its windows looks at me the Illimitable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
113:Kali (Iron Lords of Time)
Am love, am passion; I create the world.
I am the only Brahma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,
114:The wife unsung remains
Sharing his pleasures, taking half his pains
While to dream faces mounts the poet's song. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Euphrosyne
115:Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
116:It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
117:Out, out with the mind and its candle flares,
Light, light the suns that never die. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,
118:O worshipper of the formless Infinite,
    Reject not form, what dwells in it is He. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,
119:The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
120:The impossible is the hint of what shall be,
Mortal the door to immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us,
121:In vain was my prison of separate body made;
His occult presence burns in every cell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
122:The darkness was the Omnipotent's abode,
Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,
123:A spark of the eternal Fire, it came
To build a house in Matter for the Unborn. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
124:He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,
And does what Matter must or Spirit can. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Enigma,
125:Mystic daughter of Delight,
Life, thou ecstasy,
Let the radius of thy flight
Be eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life,
126:Naked my spirit from its vestures stands;
I am alone with my own self for space. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self's Infinity,
127:When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
128:Chaff are men's armies
Threshed by the flails of Fate; 'tis the soul of the hero that conquers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
129:I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
130:In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Unseen Infinite,
131:In the night a million stars arise
To watch us with their ancient friendly eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Perigone Prologuises,
132:Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach
Greatness to our divine Bengali speech. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Madhusudan Dutt,
133:The blue sea dances like a girl
With sapphire and with pearl
Crowning her locks. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
134:Thy golden Light came down into my feet;
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Golden Light,
135:Immeasurable ecstasy where Time
And Space have fainted in a swoon sublime! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
136:Death is but changing of our robes to wait
In wedding garments at the Eternal's gate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,
137:Impassive, I bear each act and thought and mood:
Time traverses my hushed infinitude. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,
138:Not alone the mind in its trouble
God beholds, but the spirit behind that has joy of the torture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
139:Time voyages with Thee upon its prow,—
And all the future's passionate hope is Thou. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,
140:Strength men desire in their masters;
All men worship success and in failure and weakness abandon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
141:An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Despair on the Staircase,
142:Unborn I sit, timeless, intangible:
All things are shadows in my tranquil glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
143:As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose,
Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Silver Call,
144:A Witness dwells within our secrecies,
The incarnate Godhead in the body of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
145:Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
146:Forewilled by the gods, Alexander,
All things happen on earth and yet we must strive who are mortals, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
147:In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
148:O Thou who climb'dst to mind from the dull stone,
Face now the miracled summits still unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
149:A death that eats and eating is devoured,
This is the brutal image of the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
150:At the Guru's death, either the Body awakens or His Work in the world is forsaken and His light grows dim. In every breath, remember Him." ~ Red Hawk, (b. 1943) "Mother Guru: Savitri Love Poems,", (2014),
151:Kama (Desire)
My desire
Takes many forms; I change and wheel and race,
And with Me runs creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,
152:Like common men he lived to whom the ray
Of a new sun but brings another day
Unmeaning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,
153:My mind has left its prison-camp of brain;
It pours, a luminous sea from spirit heights. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Sovereign,
154:My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl;
I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
155:To perish is better for man or for nation
Nobly in battle, nor end disgraced by disease or subjection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
156:Our body is an epitome of some Vast
    That masks its presence by our humanness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,
157:There is a need within the soul of man
    The splendours of the surface never sate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,
158:Life only is, or death is life disguised,—
Life a short death until by life we are surprised. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life and Death,
159:Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,
The Immortal's gradual birth mid mire and stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
160:Yet is the dark Inconscient whence came all
The self-same Power that shines on high unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator,
161:I am the light in stars, of flowers
The bloom, the nameless fragrance that pervades
Creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
162:Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,
163:Busy our hearts are weaving thoughts and images always:
After their kind they see what here we call truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
164:Morning has pleasure, noon has golden peace
And afternoon repose and eve the heart's increase. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
165:Not in this living net
Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind
Is a man's manhood seated. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,
166:Light, burning Light from the Infinite's diamond heart
Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,
167:He sowed the desert with ruddy-hearted rose,
The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bankim Chandra Chatterji,
168:The high gods watch in their silence,
Mute they endure for a while that the doom may be swifter and greater. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
169:I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,
170:Action Human and Divine
Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
171:Gesture (Mudra)
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine.
Time is my drama or my pageant dream. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,
172:Not by a little pain and not by a temperate labour
Trained is the nation chosen by Zeus for a dateless dominion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
173:Summer has pleasant comrades, happy meetings
Of lily and rose and from the trees divinest greetings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
174:This is our human destiny; every moment of living
Toil and loss have gained in the constant siege of our bodies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
175:All things yield to a man and Zeus is himself his accomplice
When like a god he wills without remorse or longing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
176:Only on the heart's veiled door the word of flame
Is written, the secret and tremendous Name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
177:When youth has quenched its soft and magic light,
Delightful things remain but dead is their delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
178:Count not life nor death, defeat nor triumph, Pyrrhus.
Only thy soul regard and the gods in thy joy or thy labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
179:The One devised innumerably to be;
His oneness in invisible forms he hides,
Time's tiny temples to eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
180:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,
181:Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
182:No thought is vain; our very dreams
Substantial are;
The light we see in fancy, yonder gleams
In the star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
183:A sole thing the Gods
Demand from all men living, sacrifice:
Nor without this shall any crown be grasped. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
184:Conscious dimly of births unfinished hid in our being
Rest we cannot; a world cries in us for space and for fullness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
185:Earth cannot long resist the man whom Heaven has chosen;
Gods with him walk; his chariot is led; his arm is assisted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
186:For in selfhood and existence I have felt only fatigue." ~ Divani Shamsi Tabriz, xxxii, collection of lyric poems, contains more than 40,000 verses, considered one of the greatest works of Persian literature, Wikipedia,
187:Power is divine; divinest of all is power over mortals.
Power then the conqueror seeks and power the imperial nation, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
188:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,
189:Leave to the night its phantoms, leave to the future its curtain!
Only today Heaven gave to mortal man for his labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
190:Life and treasure and fame to cast on the wings of a moment,
Fiercer joy than this the gods have not given to mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
191:Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
192:The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill;
I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Man,
193:He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
194:I would hear, in my spirit's wideness solitary,
    The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,
195:Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, God,
196:Blinded are human hearts by desire and fear and possession,
Darkened is knowledge on earth by hope the helper of mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
197:All things are by Time and the Will eternal that moves us,
And for each birth its hour is set in the night or the dawning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
198:Man over woman, woman o'er man, over lover and foeman
Wrestling we strive to expand in our souls, to be wide, to be happy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
199:Something watches behind, Spirit or Self or Soul,
Viewing Space and its toil, waiting the end of Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,
200:The vault of heaven
Is not a true similitude for man
Whose space outgyres thought's last horizon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
201:This world behind is made of truer stuff
        Than the manufactured tissue of earth's grace. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Fields,
202:World-rhythms
Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight
World after world bursts on the awakened sight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Other Earths,
203:Even as death shall gather us all for memory's clusters,
All in their day who were great or were little, heroes or cowards. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
204:Led or misled we are mortals and walk by a light that is given;
Most they err who deem themselves most from error excluded. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
205:Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany
Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
206:Men live like stars that see each other in heaven,
But one knows not the pleasure and the grief
The others feel ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
207:Easily nations bow to a yoke when their virtue relaxes;
Hard is the breaking fetters once worn, for the virtue has perished. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
208:Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,
Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
209:Not of the fire am I terrified, not of the sword and its slaying;
Vileness of men appals me, baseness I fear and its voices. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
210:This observe, thy task in thy destiny noble or fallen;
Time and result are the gods'; with these things be not thou troubled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
211:What we call sin,
    Is but man's leavings as from deep within
The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,
212:While thou livest, perfectly fulfil
Thy part, conceive
Earth as thy stage, thyself the actor strong,
The drama His. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
213:For grief and pain
Are errors of the clouded soul; behind
They do not stain
The living spirit who to these is blind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
214:Non-Violence
Deem nothing vain: through many veils
This Spirit gleams.
The dreams of God are truths and He prevails. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
215:Occult masters of destiny,
They who sit in the Secrecy
And watch unmoved ever
Unto the end of all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Winged with Dangerous Deity,
216:In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even
Pain is the ransom we pay for the smallest foretaste of heaven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
217:Light, brooding Light! each smitten passionate cell
In a mute blaze of ecstasy preserves
A living sense of the Imperishable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,
218:Always a few will be left whom the threatenings of Fate cannot conquer,
Always souls are born whose courage waits not on fortune ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
219:Great men and death
Such puissance great well-poisèd natures prove
To mould to their own likeness all they love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,
220:Hear its cry when God's moment changing our fate comes visored
Silently into our lives and the spirit too knows, for it watches. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
221:Not as the ways of other mortals are theirs who are guided,
They whose eyes are the gods and they walk by a light that is secret. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
222:Thought could not think in him, flesh could not quiver;
    The feet of Time could not adventure here ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Yogi on the Whirlpool,
223:Life with her wine-cup of longing under the purple of her tenture,
Death as her gate of escape and rebirth and renewal of venture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
224:Souls that are true to themselves are immortal; the soulless for ever
Lingers helpless in Hades a shade among shades disappointed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
225:Atom and molecule in their unseen plan
Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses,
Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
226:One sole oracle helps, still armoured in courage and prudence
Patient and heedful to toil at the work that is near in the daylight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
227:Only of one thing
Man can be sure, the will in his heart and his strength in his purpose:
This too is Fate and this too the gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
228:with a radish." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-Tea, Wikipedia.,
229:Destiny's lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining,
Draws us through tangles of failure and victory's inextricable twining. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
230:Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven's that are bare and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to Infinity flying. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
231:Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God,
Towards whom we drove
In spite of weakness, evil, grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
232:Yet was the battle decreed for the means supreme of the mortal
Placed in a world where all things strive from the worm to the Titan. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
233:Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle,
Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
234:We must pass through the aeons; Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
235:Charmed men applaud the skilful purpose, the dexterous speaker;
This they forget that a Force decides, not the wiles of the statesman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
236:Only the illimitable Permanent
    Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
        Replaces all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,
237:Dear are the halls of our childhood, dear are the fields of our fathers,
Yet to the soul that is free no spot on the earth is an exile. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
238:This is the nature of earth that to blows she responds and by scourgings
Travails excited; pain is the bed of her blossoms of pleasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
239:Hard is the way to the Eternal for the mind-born will of the mortal
Bound by the body and life to the gait of the house-burdened turtle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
240:Hid in our hearts is his glory; the Spirit works in our members.
Silence is he, with our voices he speaks, in our thoughts he remembers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
241:Blood and grief are the ransom of men for the joys of their transience,
For we are mortals bound in our strength and beset in our labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
242:Strange, remote and splendid
Childhood's fancy pure
Thrills to thoughts we cannot fathom,
Quick felicities obscure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Child's Imagination,
243:I am that Madan who inform the stars
With lustre and on life's wide canvas fill
Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
244:None has been able to hold all the gods in his bosom unstaggered,
All have grown drunken with force and have gone down to Hell and to Ate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
245:One is there only, apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning,—
He who has sent through his soul's wide spaces the universe spinning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
246:Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow
If by her heart's toil a loan-light of joy from the heavens she can borrow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
247:There our sun cannot shine and our moon has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire of these spaces is suffered. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
248:Dread not the ruin, fear not the storm-blast, yield not, O Trojans.
Zeus shall rebuild. Death ends not our days, the fire shall not triumph. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
249:Not on the tramp of the multitudes, not on the cry of the legions
Founds the strong man his strength but the god that he carries within him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
250:On the safe land
To linger is to lose what God has planned
    For man's wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To the Sea,
251:And this the reason of his high unease,
    Because he came from the infinities
To build immortally with mortal things; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,
252:Gods change not their strength, but are of old
And as of old, and man, though less than these,
May yet proceed to greater, self-evolved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
253:Knowing all vain, yet we strive; for our nature seizing us always
Drives like the flock that is herded and urged towards shambles or pasture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
254:Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not,
Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
255:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight,
    Thy grasp. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,
256:Easy is the love that lasts
Only with favours in the shopman heart!
Who, smitten, takes and gives the kiss, he loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
257:This grey hour was born
For the ascetic in his silent cave
And for the dying man whose heart released
Loosens its vibrant strings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,
258:Man, by experience of passion purged,
His myriad faculty perfecting, widens
His nature as it rises till it grows
With God conterminous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
259:Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense." ~ e. e. cummings, (1894 - 1962), American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright, wrote approx. 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays, Wikipedia.,
260:Always man's Fate hangs poised on the flitting breath of a moment;
Called by some word, by some gesture it leaps, then 'tis graven, 'tis granite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
261:We, too, by the Eternal Might are led
To whatsoever goal He wills.
Our helm He grasps, our generous sail outspread
His strong breath fills. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
262:Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,
263:Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me. ~ Louis C K,
264:He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,
265:Sin exalted
Seizes secure on the thrones of the world for her glorious portion,
Down to the bottomless pit the good man is thrust in his virtue. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
266:And all man's ghastly company of fears
Are born of folly that believes this span
Of brittle life can limit immortal man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To Weep because a Glorious Sun,
267:The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,
268:A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Tree,
269:Is not the world his disguise? when that cloak is tossed back from his shoulders,
Beauty looks out like a sun on the hearts of the ravished beholders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
270:Vain, they have said, is the anguish of man and his labour diurnal,
Vainly his caravans cross through the desert of Time to the Eternal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,
271:Thick and persistent the night confronts all his luminous longings;
Dire death's sickle mows like a harvest his hosts and his throngings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,
272:Wilt thou not perfect this rather that sprang too from Wisdom and Power?
Taking the earthly rose canst thou image not Heaven in a flower? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
273:My mind is awake in stirless trance,
Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;
Dispelled is the senses' flicker-dance,
Mute the body aureate with light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Trance,
274:Around me was a formless solitude:
All had become one strange Unnameable,
An unborn sole Reality world-nude,
Topless and fathomless, for ever still. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,
275:Confident of His grace, expect His will;
Let Him lead; though hidden be the bourne,
See Him in all that happens; that fulfil
For which thou wert born. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
276:fools! whose pride
Absurd the gods permit a little space
To please their souls with laughter, then replace
In the loud limbo of futilities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,
277:Rejoice and fear not for the waves that swell,
The storms that thunder, winds that sweep;
Always our Captain holds the rudder well,
He does not sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
278:Time is a strong convention; future and present
Were living in the past;
They are one image that our wills complaisant
Into three schemes have cast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,
279:Lo, all these peoples and who was it fashioned them? Who is unwilling
Still to have done with it? laughs beyond pain and saves in the killing? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
280:Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature
And have a dateless birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,
They were not made on earth, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,
281:Summer is dead and rich repose
And springtide and the rose,
And woods and all sweet things make moan;
The weeping earth is turned to stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
282:Man worships the ungrasped. His vagrant thought
Still busy with the illimitable void
Lives all the time by little things upbuoyed
Which he contemns ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Euphrosyne,
283:Noble be in peace, invincible, brave in the battle,
Stern and calm to thy foe, to the suppliant merciful. Mortal
Favour and wrath as thou walkst heed never ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
284:I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,
285:Still, still we can hear them
Now, if we listen long in our souls, the bygone voices.
Earth in her fibres remembers, the breezes are stored with our echoes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
286:Therefore is the woman's part
Nearest divine, who to one motion keeps
And like the fixed immortal planets' round
Is constant to herself in him she loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Uloupie,
287:Flying out from the Great Buddha's nose: a swallow." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals, better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea, Wikipedia.,
288:Yama, the strong pure Hades sad and subtle,
Dharma, who keeps the laws of old untouched,
Critanta, who ends all things and at last
Himself shall end. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
289:Temple-ground
Man, shun the impulses dire that spring armed from thy nature's abysms!
Dread the dusk rose of the gods, flee the honey that tempts from its petals! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
290:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet.
Workings immortal obscurely struggling, hints of a godhead
Labour to form in this clay a divinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
291:In some faint dawn,
In some dim eve,
    Like a gesture of Light,
    Like a dream of delight
Thou com'st nearer and nearer to me. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In Some Faint Dawn,
292:All is not finished in the unseen decree;
A Mind beyond our mind demands our ken,
A life of unimagined harmony
Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
293:He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.
Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,
I stand upon its boundaries and stare
Into the frontiers of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
294:Let the little troubled life-god within
Cast his veils from the still soul,
His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,
His clamour and glamour and thole and dole ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,
295:Wise are the gods in their silence,
Wise when they speak; but their speech is other than ours and their wisdom
Hard for a mortal mind to hold and not madden or wander. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
296:My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
    My body is God's happy living tool,
        My spirit a vast sun of deathless light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,
297:Fate severe like a mother
Teaches our wills by disaster and strikes down the props that would weaken,
Fate and the Thought on high that is wiser than yearnings of mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
298:I have broken the limits of embodied mind
And am no more the figure of a soul.
The burning galaxies are in me outlined;
The universe is my stupendous whole. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,
299:I have escaped and the small self is dead;
I am immortal, alone, ineffable;
I have gone out from the universe I made,
And have grown nameless and immeasurable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,
300:I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,
I have offered up my will to be Thy will:
Let nothing of myself be left behind
In our union mystic and unutterable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
301:Lure of the Infinite
With a hundred marvellous faces
Always he lures us to love him, always he draws us to pleasure
Leaving remembrance and anguish behind for our only treasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ahana, Lure of the Infinite
302:We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch." ~ E. E. Cummings, (1894 -1962), American poet, painter, author, and playwright, wrote approx. 2,900 poems, Wikipedia.,
303:Fools or hypocrites! Meanest falsehood is this among mortals,
Veils of purity weaving, names misplacing ideal
When our desires we disguise and paint the lusts of our nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
304:He is not anything, yet all is He;
He is not all but far exceeds that scope.
Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:
Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,
305:Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
306:And high Delight, a spirit infinite,
That is the fountain of this glorious world,
Delight that labours in its opposite,
Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,
307:On the white summit of eternity
    A single Soul of bare infinities,
    Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace
His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Shiva,
308:There are two beings in my single self.
A Godhead watches Nature from behind
At play in front with a brilliant surface elf,
A time-born creature with a human mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,
309:Form in its heart of silence recondite
    Hides the significance of His mystery,
    Form is the wonder-house of eternity,
A cavern of the deathless Eremite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,
310:A life of intensities wide, immune
Floats behind the earth and her life-fret,
A magic of realms mastered by spell and rune,
Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
311:It is Thy rapture flaming through my nerves
And all my cells and atoms thrill with Thee;
My body Thy vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Thy ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity,
312:He must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
Until he meets upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil—or thunderstroke of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,
313:Some huge somnambulist Intelligence
Devising without thought process and plan
Arrayed the burning stars' magnificence,
The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,
314:I housed within my heart the life of things,
All hearts athrob in the world I felt as mine;
I shared the joy that in creation sings
And drank its sorrow like a poignant wine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,
315:now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The Voice that only Silence' ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,
316:My mind is hushed in wide and endless light,
My heart a solitude of delight and peace,
My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,
My body a point in white infinities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,
317:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
318:Who art thou in the heart comrade of man who sitst
August, watching his works, watching his joys and griefs,
Unmoved, careless of pain, careless of death and fate? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,
319:A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,
A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,
A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,
320:I shall not die.
    Although this body, when the spirit tires
    Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires,
My house consumes, not I. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Triumph-Song of Trishuncou,
321:One on another we prey and one by another are mighty.
This is the world and we have not made it; if it is evil,
Blame first the gods; but for us, we must live by its laws or we perish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
322:Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacrifice wasted ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
323:I saw my soul a traveller through Time;
From life to life the cosmic ways it trod,
Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime,
Evolving from the worm into the god. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
324:Love and the need of mastery, joy and the longing for greatness
Rage like a fire unquenchable burning the world and creating,
Nor till humanity dies will they sink in the ashes of Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
325:One, universal, ensphering creation,
Wheeling no more with inconscient Nature,
Feel thyself God-born, know thyself deathless.
Timeless return to thy immortal existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,
326:The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth,
The mindless stirrings of the plant and tree
Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
327:This mute stupendous Energy that whirls
The stars and nebulae in its long train,
Like a huge Serpent through my being curls
With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness Spirit,
328:We are but sparks of that most perfect fire,
Waves of that sea:
From Him we come, to Him we go, desire
Eternally,
And so long as He wills, our separate birth
Is and shall be. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
329:All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice,
Music and thunder and the cry of birds,
Life's babble of her sorrows and her joys,
Cadence of human speech and murmured words, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing,
330:In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
331:That is our home and that the secret hope
Our hearts explore.
To bring those heavens down upon the earth
We all descend,
And fragments of it in the human birth
We can command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
332:Now from his cycle sleepless and vast round the dance of the earth-globe
Gold Hyperion rose in the wake of the dawn like the eyeball
Flaming of God revealed by his uplifted luminous eyelid. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
333:I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind's speed and the blazing star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,
334:The Master who bends o'er His creatures,
Suffers their sins and their errors and guides them screening the guidance;
Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
335:All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
336:My life is the life of village and continent,
I am earth's agony and her throbs of bliss;
I share all creatures' sorrow and content
And feel the passage of every stab and kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,
337:No danger can perturb my spirit's calm:
My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;
Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,
Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune's glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
338:Soul in the Ignorance, wake from its stupor.
Flake of the world-fire, spark of Divinity,
Lift up thy mind and thy heart into glory.
Sun in the darkness, recover thy lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,
339:A king of greatness and a slave of love,
Host of the stars and guest in Nature's inn,
A high spectator spirit throned above,
A pawn of passion in the game divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,
340:Love men, love God. Fear not to love, O King,
Fear not to enjoy;
For Death's a passage, grief a fancied thing
Fools to annoy.
From self escape and find in love alone
A higher joy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
341:All is abolished but the mute Alone.
    The mind from thought released, the heart from grief
    Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,
342:I know, O God, the day shall dawn at last
When man shall rise from playing with the mud
And taking in his hands the sun and stars
Remould appearance, law and process old. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
343:Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,
Our strength a parody of the Immortal's power,
Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal's way
Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
344:There is a joy behind suffering; pain digs our road to his pleasance.
All things have bliss for their secret; only our consciousness falters
Fearing to offer itself as a victim on ecstasy's altars. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
345:Two are the ends of existence, two are the dreams of the Mother:
Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other,—
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
346:Who shall foretell the event of a battle, the fall of a footstep?
Oracles, visions and prophecies voice but the dreams of the mortal,
And 'tis our spirit within is the Pythoness tortured in Delphi. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
347:Over all earthly things the soul that is fearless is master,
Only on death he can reckon not whether it comes in the midnight
Treading the couch of Kings in their pride or speeds in the spear-shaft. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
348:There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun,
A Bliss in the heart's crypt grown fiery white,
The heart of a world in which all hearts are one,
A Silence on the mountains of delight, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
349:Life renewed its ways which death and sleep cannot alter,
Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not,
Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
350:Mortals, your end is beatitude, rapture eternal his meaning:
Joy, which he most now denies, is his purpose: the hedges, the screening
Were but the rules of his play; his denials came to lure farther. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
351:I dwell in the spirit's calm nothing can move
And watch the actions of Thy vast world-force,
Its mighty wings that through infinity move
And the Time-gallopings of the deathless Horse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness Spirit,
352:Yet in the midst of our labour and weeping not utterly lonely
Wander our steps, nor are terror and grief our portion only.
Do we not hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
353:A creature of his own grey ignorance,
    A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath
    That wrestles, captive in a world of death,
To live some lame brief years. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,
354:Back from his nature he drew to the passionless peaks of the spirit,
Throned where it dwells for ever uplifted and silent and changeless
Far beyond living and death, beyond Nature and ending of Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
355:How shall they prosper who haste after auguries, oracles, whispers,
Dreams that walk in the night and voices obscure of the silence?
Touches are these from the gods that bewilder the brain to its ruin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
356:Our souls travelling different paths have met in the ages
Each for its work and they cling for an hour to the names of affection,
Then Time's long waves bear them apart for new forms we shall know not, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
357:Self-Giving
Hateful I hold him who sworn to a cause that is holy and common
Broods upon private wrongs or serving his lonely ambition
Studies to reap his gain from the labour and woe of his fellows. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
358:Dead is the past; the void has possessed it; its drama is ended,
Finished its music. The future is dim and remote from our knowledge;
Silent it lies on the knees of the gods in their luminous stillness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
359:Two genii in the dubious heart of man,
    Two great unhappy foes together bound
    Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground;
They strive for ever since the race began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,
360:All eyes that look on me are my sole eyes;
The one heart that beats within all breasts is mine.
The world's happiness flows through me like wine,
Its million sorrows are my agonies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
361:Each of us bears his punishment, fruit of a seed that's forgotten;
Each of us curses his neighbour protecting his heart with illusions:
Therefore like children we blame each other and hate and are angry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
362:Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
    Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
        One in a mighty and single vastness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,
363:Moved man's tongue in its wrath looses speech that is hard to be pardoned,
Afterwards stilled we regret, we forgive. If all were resented,
None could live on this earth that is thick with our stumblings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
364:Pride is not for our clay; the earth, not heaven was our mother
And we are even as the ant in our toil and the beast in our dying;
Only who cling to the hands of the gods can rise up from the earth-mire. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
365:Life and mind and their glory and debate
Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme,
    A sketch confused of a supernal plan,
        A preface to the epic of the Supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,
366:There is a silence greater than any known
To earth's dumb spirit, motionless in the soul
    That has become Eternity's foothold,
        Touched by the infinitudes for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,
367:He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought:
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is caught. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
368:Oneness unknown to us dwells in these millions of figures and faces,
Wars with itself in our battles, loves in our clinging embraces,
Inly the self and the substance of things and their cause and their mover ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
369:Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
    A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
        Azure on azure, is mutely gazing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,
370:This iron, brute, gigantic helpless toy
They call a world, this thing that turns and turns
And shrieks and bleeds and cannot stop, this victim
Broken and living yet on its own wheel, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
371:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
372:Into this life which the sunlight bounds and the greenness has cradled,
Armed with strength we have come; as our strength is, so is our joyance.
What but for joyance is birth and what but for joyance is living? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
373:Leave to the gods their godhead and, mortal, turn to thy labour;
Take what thou canst from the hour that is thine and be fearless in spirit;
This is the greatness of man and the joy of his stay in the sunlight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
374:Near to the quiet truth of things we stand
In this grey moment. Neither happy light
Nor joyful sound deceives the listening heart,
Nor Night inarms, the Mother brooding vast,
To comfort us with sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,
375:The gods have invented
Only one way for a man through the world, O my slavegirl Briseis,
Valiant to be and noble and truthful and just to the humble,
Only one way for a woman, to love and serve and be faithful. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
376:Although consenting here to a mortal body,
He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not;
    For him the aeons are a playground,
        Life and its deeds are his splendid shadow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,
377:Yet his advance,
Attempt of a divinity within,
    A consciousness in the inconscient Night,
    To realise its own supernal Light,
Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,
378:Has put the stars out ere the light,
And from their dewy cushions rise
Sweet flowers half-opening their eyes.
O pleasant then to feel as if new-born
The sweet, unripe and virgin air, the air of morn. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
379:What though 'tis true that the river of Life through the Valley of Peril
Flows! But the diamond shines on the cliffside, jacinth and beryl
Gleam in the crannies, sapphire, smaragdus the roadway bejewel, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
380:My soul's wide self of living infinite Space
Outlines its body luminous and unborn
    Behind the earth-robe; under the earth-mask grows clear
        The mould of an imperishable face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Immortality,
381:Out and alas! earth's greatest are earth and they fail in the testing,
Conquered by sorrow and doubt, fate's hammerers, fires of her furnace.
God in their souls they renounce and submit to their clay and its promptings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
382:My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love,
My body become Thy engine for earth-use;
In my nerves and veins Thy rapture's streams shall move;
My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
383:To heal the evils and mistakes of Space
And change the tragedy of the ignorant world
Into a Divine Comedy of joy
And the laughter and the rapture of God's bliss.
The Mother of God is mother of our souls ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Mother of God,
384:Transient, we made not ourselves, but at birth from the first we were fashioned
Valiant or fearful and as was our birth by the gods and their thinkings
Formed, so already enacted and fixed by their wills are our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
385:Who can point out the way of the gods and the path of their travel,
Who shall impose on them bounds and an orbit? The winds have their treading,-
They can be followed and seized, not the gods when they move towards their purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
386:Perhaps the heart of God for ever sings
And worlds come throbbing out from every note;
Perhaps His soul sits ever calm and still
And listens to the music rapturously,
Himself adoring, by Himself adored. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
387:Soul, my soul
   Soul, my soul, yet ascend crossing the marge of life:
   Mount out far above Time, reach to the golden end
   ... Live there lost in God space, rapturous, vacant, mute,
   Sun-bright, timeless, immense, single and absolute.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
388:Then as now men walked in the round which the gods have decreed them
Eagerly turning their eyes to the lure and the tool and the labour.
Chained is their gaze to the span in front, to the gulfs they are blinded
Meant for their steps. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
389:Greater it seems to my mind to be king over men than their slayer,
Nobler to build and to govern than what the ages have laboured
Putting their godhead forth to create or the high gods have fashioned,
That to destroy in our wrath of a moment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
390:Such were a dream of some sage at night when he muses in fancy,
Imaging freely a flawless world where none were afflicted,
No man inferior, all could sublimely equal and brothers
Live in a peace divine like the gods in their luminous regions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
391:All things are subject to sweet pleasure,
But three things keep her richest measure,
The breeze that visits heaven
And knows the planets seven,
The green spring with its flowery truth
Creative and the luminous heart of youth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
392:The knowledge of mortals is bound unto blindness.
Either only they walk mid the coloured dreams of the senses
Treading the greenness of earth and deeming the touch of things real,
Or if they see, by the curse of the gods their sight into falsehood ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
393:All over earth men wept and bled and laboured, world-wide
Sowing Fate with their deeds and had other fruit than they hoped for,
Out of desires and their passionate griefs and fleeting enjoyments
Weaving a tapestry fit for the gods to admire, who in ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
394:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud.
This by pain we prevent; we compel his ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
395:Men must sow earth with their hearts and their tears that their country may prosper;
Earth who bore and devours us that life may be born from our remnants.
Then shall the Sacrifice gather its fruits when the war-shout is silent,
Nor shall the blood ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
396:Only one doom irreparable treads down the soul of a nation,
Only one downfall endures; 'tis the ruin of greatness and virtue,
Mourning when Freedom departs from the life and the heart of a people,
Into her room comes creeping the mind of the slave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
397:Then if the tempest be loud and the thunderbolt leaping incessant
Shatters the roof, if the lintels flame at last and each cornice
Shrieks with the pain of the blast, if the very pillars totter,
Keep yet your faith in Zeus, hold fast to the word of ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
398:All whose eyes can pierce that curtain, gaze into dimness;
This they have glimpsed and that they imagine deceived by their natures
Seeing the forms in their hearts of dreadful things and of joyous;
As in the darkness our eyes are deceived by shadows ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
399:Earth that was wakened by pain to life and by hunger to thinking
Left to her joys rests inert and content with her gains and her station.
But for the unbearable whips of the gods back soon to her matter
She would go glad and the goal would be missed ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
400:Hopes that were confident, fates that sprang dire from the seed of a moment,
Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacr ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
401:This is the burden of man that he acts from his heart and his passions,
Stung by the goads of the gods he hews at the ties that are dearest.
Lust was the guide they sent us, wrath was a whip for his coursers,
Madness they made the heart's comrade, r ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
402:This is the greatness of gods that they know and can put back the knowledge;
Doing the work they have chosen they turn not for fruit nor for failure,
Griefless they walk to their goal and strain not their eyes towards the ending.
Light that they hav ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
403:What can man suffer direr or worse than enslaved from a victor
Boons to accept, to take safety and ease from the foe and the stranger,
Fallen from the virtue stern that heaven permits to a mortal?
Death is not keener than this nor the slaughter of f ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
404:Who among men has not thoughts that he holds for the wisest, though foolish?
Who, though feeble and nought, esteems not his strength o'er his fellow's?
Therefore the wisest and strongest choose out a king and a leader,
Not as a perfect arbiter armed ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
405:Children of Immortality, gods who are joyous for ever,
Rapture is ours and eternity measures our lives by his aeons.
For we desireless toil who have joy in the fall as the triumph,
Knowledge eternal possessing we work for an end that is destined
L ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
406:He who a god for his kindred,
Lives for the rest without bowels of pity or fellowship, lone-souled,
Scorning the world that he rules, who untamed by the weight of an empire
Holds allies as subjects, subjects as slaves and drives to the battle
Care ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
407:His flute with its sweetness ensnaring
Sounds in our ears in the night and our souls of their teguments baring
Hales us out naked and absolute, out to his woodlands eternal,
Out to his moonlit dances, his dalliance sweet and supernal,
And we go st ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
408:In earth's rhythm of shadow and sunlight
Storm is the dance of the locks of the God assenting to greatness,
Zeus who with secret compulsion orders the ways of our nature;
Veiled in events he lives and working disguised in the mortal
Builds our str ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
409:Man who has towered
Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level,
Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil,
He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic,
Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
410:Surely the gods protect, yet is Death too always mighty.
Most in his shadowy envy he strikes at the brave and the lovely,
Grudging works to abridge their days and to widow the sunlight.
Most, disappointed, he rages against the beloved of Heaven;
S ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
411:Though the people hear us not, yet are we bound to our nation:
Over the people the gods are; over a man is his country;
This is the deity first adored by the hearths of the noble.
For by our nation's will we are ruled in the home and the battle
An ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
412:Evil is worked, not justice, when into the mould of our thinkings
God we would force and enchain to the throb of our hearts the immortals,—
Justice and Virtue, her sister,—for where is justice mid creatures
Perfectly? Even the gods are betrayed by o ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
413:God:::
Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love!

Thou who disdainest not the worm to be
Nor even the clod,
Therefore we know by that humility
That thou art God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
414:Kama (Desire)
Delight and laughter walking hand in hand
Go with Me, and I play with grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Kama
Kama (Desire)
All energies put into activity—thought, speech, feeling, act—go to constitute Karma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Karma and Heredity,
415:Stood visible, Titanic, scarlet-clad,
Dark as a thunder-cloud, with streaming hair
Obscuring heaven, and in her sovran grasp
The sword, the flower, the boon, the bleeding head,—
Bhavani. Then she vanished; the daylight
Was ordinary in a common w ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,
416:God's Tread
Once we have chosen to be as the gods, we must follow that motion.
Knowledge must grow in us, might like a Titan's, bliss like an ocean,
Calmness and purity born of the spirit's gaze on the Real,
Rapture of his oneness embracing the soul in a clasp ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
417:Time in its cycles waited for man. Though his kingdom is ended,
Here in a speck mid the suns and his life is a throb in the aeons,
Yet, O you Titans and Gods, O Rudras, O strong Aditeians,
Man is the centre and knot; he is first, though the last in ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
418:World-destiny waits upon that foaming lip.
A Titan Power upholds this pigmy man,
The crude dwarf instrument of a mighty Force.
Hater of the free spirit's joy and light,
Made only of strength and skill and giant might,
A Will to trample humanity ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,
419:Always the wide-pacing river of Life from its far-off fountains
Flows down mighty and broad, like a warhorse brought from its manger
Arching its neck as it paces grand to the gorges of danger.
Sometimes we hesitate, often start and would turn from t ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
420:Napoleon's mind was swift and bold and vast,
His heart was calm and stormy like the sea,
His will dynamic in its grip and clasp.
His eye could hold a world within its grasp
And see the great and small things sovereignly.
A movement of gigantic d ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,
421:Now I have done with space and my soul is released from the hours.
Saved is my heart from the need of joy, the attraction to sorrow,
Who have escaped from my past and forgotten today and tomorrow;
I have grown vacant and mighty, naked and wide as th ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
422:Mother-Earth
Who but the fool and improvident, who but the dreamer and madman
Leaves for the far and ungrasped earth's close and provident labour?
Children of earth, our mother gives tokens, she lays down her signposts,
Step by step to advance on her bosom, to g ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
423:Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails.
We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.
Our hearts are heroic and hard; we wear the belt of Orion:
Our will has the edge of the thunderbolt, o ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Children of Wotan,
424:Vainly the divine whispers seek us; the heights are rejected.
Man to his earth drawn always prefers his nethermost promptings,
Man, devouring, devoured who is slayer and slain through the ages
Since by the beast he soars held and exceeds not that pedestals measure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
425:We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan,
We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage.
A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will,
We were born in humanity's sunset, to the Night is our pil ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Children of Wotan,
426:Earth-Memory
The earth is safer, warmer its sunbeams;
Death and limits are known; so he clings to them hating the summons.
So might one dwell who has come to take joy in a fair-lighted prison;
Amorous grown of its marble walls and its noble adornments,
Lost to ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
427:I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime
And still that weary journeying knows no end;
Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,
There comes no voice of the celestial Friend.
And yet I know my footprints' track shall be
A pathway towards I ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Pilgrim of the Night,
428:A Tree :::

A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven amorous.

This is the soul of man. Body and brain
Hungry for earth our heavenly flight detain.

~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
429:All opposition seems and strife and chance,
An aimless labour with but scanty sense,
To eyes that see a part and miss the whole; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
Part-Experience
When youth has quenched its soft and magic light,
Delightful things remain but dead is their delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
430:A might no human will nor force can gain,
A knowledge seated in eternity,
A bliss beyond our struggle and our pain
Are the high pinnacles of our destiny. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Evolution - II
Man's destiny
The Mantra is born through the heart and shaped or massed by the thinking mind into a chariot of that godhead of the Eternal of whom the truth seen is a face or a form. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Ideal Spirit of Poetry,
431:But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. ~ Robert Ardrey,
432:Bride of the Fire :::

Bride of the Fire, clasp me now close, -
Bride of the Fire!
I have shed the bloom of the earthly rose,
I have slain desire.

Beauty of the Light, surround my life, -
Beauty of the Light!
I have sacrificed longing and parted from grief,
I can bear thy delight.

Image of Ecstasy, thrill and enlace, -
Image of Bliss!
I would see only thy marvellous face,
Feel only thy kiss.

Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, -
Call of the One!
Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,
O living sun. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
433:Vainly the sands of Time have been strewn with the ruins of empires,
Signs that the gods had left, but in vain. For they look for a nation,
One that can conquer itself having conquered the world, but they find none. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Self-conquest
When one conquers a difficulty or goes forward, it creates a right current in the atmosphere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV: The Right Attitude towards Difficulties
Self-Conquest
Self-denial is a necessary discipline for the soul of man, because his heart is ignorantly attached. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation,
434:Krishna:::
At last I find a meaning of soul's birth
Into this universe terrible and sweet,
I who have felt the hungry heart of earth
Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna's feet.

I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,
And heard the passion of the Lover's flute,
And known a deathless ecstasy's surprise
And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.

Nearer and nearer now the music draws,
Life shudders with a strange felicity;
All Nature is a wide enamoured pause
Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.

For this one moment lived the ages past;
The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
435:The Golden Light :::

Thy golden Light came down into my brain
And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,
A calm illumination and a flame.

Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean-song of Thee my single note;
My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.

Thy golden Light came down into my heart
Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
And all its passions point towards only Thee.

Thy golden Light came down into my feet,
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
436:The Silver Call
There is a godhead of unrealised things
To which Time's splendid gains are hoarded dross;
A cry seems near, a rustle of silver wings
Calling to heavenly joy by earthly loss.
All eye has seen and all the ear has heard
Is a pale illusion by some greater voice
And mightier vision; no sweet sound or word,
No passion of hues that make the heart rejoice
Can equal those diviner ecstasies.
A Mind beyond our mind has sole the ken
Of those yet unimagined harmonies,
The fate and privilege of unborn men.
As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose,
Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, 594,
437:I Have A Hundred Lives:::

I have a hundred lives before me yet
To grasp thee in, O spirit ethereal,
Be sure I will with heart insatiate
Pursue thee like a hunter through them all.

Thou yet shalt turn back on the eternal way
And with awakened vision watch me come
Smiling a little at errors past, and lay
Thy eager hand in mine, its proper home.

Meanwhile made happy by thy happiness
I shall approach thee in things and people dear
And in thy spirit's motions half-possess
Loving what thou hast loved, shall feel thee near,

Until I lay my hands on thee indeed
Somewhere among the stars, as 'twas decreed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, 180,
438:The Divine Worker
I face earth's happenings with an equal soul;
In all are heard Thy steps: Thy unseen feet
Tread Destiny's pathways in my front. Life's whole
Tremendous theorem is Thou complete.
No danger can perturb my spirit's calm:
My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;
Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,
Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune's glass.
In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength;
Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan,
Indifferent to the Time-snake's crawling length.
No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.
Thy presence is my immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
439:Cosmic Consciousness :::

I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind's speed and the blazing star.

All Nature is the nursling of my care,
I am its struggle and the eternal rest;
The world's joy thrilling runs through me, I bear
The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.

I have learned a close identity with all,
Yet am by nothing bound that I become;
Carrying in me the universe's call
I mount to my imperishable home.

I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
440:Because Thou Art :::

Because Thou art All-beauty and All-bliss,
My soul blind and enamoured yearns for Thee;
It bears thy mystic touch in all that is
And thrills with the burden of that ecstasy.

Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune:
Thy sweetness haunts my heart through Nature's ways
Nowhere it beats now from Thy snare immune.

It loves Thy body in all living things;
Thy joy is there in every leaf and stone:
The moments bring thee on their fiery wings;
Sight's endless artistry is Thou alone.

Time voyages with Thee upon its prow
And all the futures passionate hope is Thou.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
441:Invitation:::
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?

Not in the petty circle of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.

I sport with solitude here in my regions,
Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.

I am the Lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
442:A talisman is a storehouse of some particular kind of energy, the kind that is needed to accomplish the task for which you have constructed it...The decisive advantage of this system is not that its variety makes it so adaptable to our needs, but that we already posses the Invocations necessary to call forth the Energies required...You must lay most closely to your heart the theory of the Magical Link and see well to it that it rings true; for without this your talisman is worse than useless. It is dangerous; for all that Energy is bound to expend itself somehow; it will make its own links with anything handy that takes its fancy; and you can get into any sort of the most serious kind of trouble...Most of my Talismans, like my Invocations, have been poems. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears,
443:The magic in a word remains magic even if it is not understood, and loses none of its power. Poems may be understandable or they may not, but they must be good, and they must be real.

From the examples of the algebraic signs on the walls of Kovalevskaia's nursery that had such a decisive influence on the child's fate, and from the example of spells, it is clear we cannot demand of all language: "be easy to understand, like the sign in the street." The speech of higher intelligence, even when it is not understandable, falls like seed into the fertile soil of the soul and only much later, in mysterious ways, does it bring forth its shoots. Does the earth understand the writing of the seeds a farmer scatters on its surface? No. But the grain still ripens in autumn, in response to those seeds. In any case, I certainly do not maintain that every incomprehensible piece of writing is beautiful. I mean only that we must not reject a piece of writing simply because it is incomprehensible to a particular group of readers. ~ Velimir Khlebnikov,
444:Yet not for tyrant wrong nor to serve as a sword for our passions
Zeus created our strength, but that earth might have help from her children.
Not of our moulding its gifts to our soul nor were formed by our labour!
When did we make them, where were ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Mother-Earth
So when the Eye supreme perceives that we rise up too swiftly,
Drawn towards height but fullness contemning, called by the azure,
Life when we fail in, poor in our base and forgetting our mother,
Back we are hurled to our roots; we recover our sap f ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Mother-Earth
Man, repelled by the gulfs within him and shrinking from vastness,
Form of the earth accepts and is glad of the lap of his mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Mother-Earth
Man does not act, even most primitively, from fear alone, but from twin motives, fear and desire, fear of things unpleasant and maleficent and desire of things pleasant and beneficent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Motives of Devotion,
445:If we are religious-minded, perhaps we will see the gods who inhabit this world. Beings, forces, sounds, lights, and rhythms are just so many true forms of the same indefinable, but not unknowable, Essence we call God; we have spoken of God, and made temples, laws or poems to try to capture the one little pulsation filling us with sunshine, but it is free as the wind on foam-flecked shores. We may also enter the world of music, which in fact is not different from the others but a special extension of this same, great inexpressible Vibration. If once, only once, even for a few moments in a lifetime, we can hear that Music, that Joy singing above, we will know what Beethoven and Bach heard; we will know what God is because we will have heard God. We will probably not say anything grandiose; we will just know that That exists, whereupon all the suffering in the world will seem redeemed.
   At the extreme summit of the overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate - sometimes much later - into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a considerable distortion and loss of light...
   ~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,
446:Musa Spiritus :::

O Word concealed in the upper fire,
Thou who hast lingered through centuries,
Descend from thy rapt white desire,
Plunging through gold eternities.

Into the gulfs of our nature leap,
Voice of the spaces, call of the Light!
Break the seals of Matter's sleep,
Break the trance of the unseen height.

In the uncertain glow of human mind,
Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts,
Carve thy epic mountain-lined
Crowded with deep prophetic grots.

Let thy hue-winged lyrics hover like birds
Over the swirl of the heart's sea.
Touch into sight with thy fire-words
The blind indwelling deity.

O Muse of the Silence, the wideness make
In the unplumbed stillness that hears thy voice,
In the vast mute heavens of the spirit awake
Where thy eagles of Power flame and rejoice.

Out, out with the mind and its candles flares,
Light, light the suns that never die.
For my ear the cry of the seraph stars
And the forms of the Gods for my naked eye!

Let the little troubled life-god within
Cast his veils from the still soul,
His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,
His clamour and glamour and thole and dole;

All make tranquil, all make free.
Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God
As He comes from His timeless infinity
To build in their rapture His burning abode.

Weave from my life His poem of days,
His calm pure dawns and His noons of force.
My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race,
My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds' course! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
447:Many men think and write through inspiration. From where does it come?

Many! That is indeed a wonderful thing. I did not think there have been so many.... So?

Poets, when they write poems...

Ah! Inspirations come from very many different places. There are inspirations that may be very material, there are inspirations that may be vital, there are inspirations that come from all kinds of mental planes, and there are very, very rare inspirations that come from the higher mind or from a still higher region. All inspirations do not come from the same place. Hence, to be inspired does not necessarily mean that one is a higher be- ing.... One may be inspired also to do and say many stupid things!

What does "inspired" mean?

It means receiving something which is beyond you, which was not within you; to open yourself to an influence which is outside your individual conscious being.

Indeed, one can have also an inspiration to commit a murder! In countries where they decapitate murderers, cut off their heads, this causes a very brutal death which throws out the vital being, not allowing it the time to decompose for coming out of the body; the vital being is violently thrown out of the body, with all its impulses; and generally it goes and lodges itself in one of those present there, men half horrified, half with a kind of unhealthy curiosity. That makes the opening and it enters within. Statistics have proved that most young murderers admit that the impulse came to them when they were present at the death of another murderer. It was an "inspiration", but of a detestable kind.

Fundamentally it is a moment of openness to something which was not within your personal consciousness, which comes from outside and rushes into you and makes you do something. This is the widest formula that can be given.

Now, generally, when people say: "Oh! he is an inspired poet", it means he has received something from high above and expressed it in a remarkable manneR But one should rather say that his inspiration is of a high quality. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,
448:Mother of Dreams :::

Goddess supreme, Mother of Dream, by thy ivory doors when thou standest,
Who are they then that come down unto men in thy visions that troop, group upon group, down the path of the shadows slanting?
Dream after dream, they flash and they gleam with the flame of the stars still around them;
Shadows at thy side in a darkness ride where the wild fires dance, stars glow and glance and the random meteor glistens;
There are voices that cry to their kin who reply; voices sweet, at the heart they beat and ravish the soul as it listens.

What then are these lands and these golden sands and these seas more radiant than earth can imagine?
Who are those that pace by the purple waves that race to the cliff-bound floor of thy jasper shore under skies in which mystery muses,
Lapped in moonlight not of our night or plunged in sunshine that is not diurnal?
Who are they coming thy Oceans roaming with sails whose strands are not made by hands, an unearthly wind advances?
Why do they join in a mystic line with those on the sands linking hands in strange and stately dances?

Thou in the air, with a flame in thy hair, the whirl of thy wonders watching,
Holdest the night in thy ancient right, Mother divine, hyacinthine, with a girdle of beauty defended.
Sworded with fire, attracting desire, thy tenebrous kingdom thou keepest,
Starry-sweet, with the moon at thy feet, now hidden now seen the clouds between in the gloom and the drift of thy tresses.
Only to those whom thy fancy chose, O thou heart-free, is it given to see thy witchcraft and feel thy caresses.

Open the gate where thy children wait in their world of a beauty undarkened.
High-throned on a cloud, victorious, proud I have espied Maghavan ride when the armies of wind are behind him;
Food has been given for my tasting from heaven and fruit of immortal sweetness;
I have drunk wine of the kingdoms divine and have healed the change of music strange from a lyre which our hands cannot master,
Doors have swung wide in the chambers of pride where the Gods reside and the Apsaras dance in their circles faster and faster.

For thou art she whom we first can see when we pass the bounds of the mortal;
There at the gates of the heavenly states thou hast planted thy wand enchanted over the head of the Yogin waving.
From thee are the dream and the shadows that seem and the fugitive lights that delude us;
Thine is the shade in which visions are made; sped by thy hands from celestial lands come the souls that rejoice for ever.
Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look in thy magic glass, then beyond thee we climb out of Space and Time to the peak of divine endeavour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
449:A God's Labour
I have gathered my dreams in a silver air
   Between the gold and the blue
And wrapped them softly and left them there,
   My jewelled dreams of you.

I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
   Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
   The moods of infinity.

But too bright were our heavens, too far away,
   Too frail their ethereal stuff;
Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;
   The roots were not deep enough.

He who would bring the heavens here
   Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
   And tread the dolorous way.

Coercing my godhead I have come down
   Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
   Twixt the gates of death and birth.

I have been digging deep and long
   Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river's song,
   A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
   To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
   Are my meed since the world began.

For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;
   Hoping its lusts to win,
He harbours within him a grisly Elf
   Enamoured of sorrow and sin.

The grey Elf shudders from heaven's flame
   And from all things glad and pure;
Only by pleasure and passion and pain
   His drama can endure.

All around is darkness and strife;
   For the lamps that men call suns
Are but halfway gleams on this stumbling life
   Cast by the Undying Ones.

Man lights his little torches of hope
   That lead to a failing edge;
A fragment of Truth is his widest scope,
   An inn his pilgrimage.

The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
   The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
   Or a demon altar choose.

All that was found must again be sought,
   Each enemy slain revives,
Each battle for ever is fought and refought
   Through vistas of fruitless lives.

My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
   And the Titan kings assail,
But I dare not rest till my task is done
   And wrought the eternal will.

How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
   "Thy hope is Chimera's head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
   Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead.

"Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease
   And joy and golden room
To us who are waifs on inconscient seas
   And bound to life's iron doom?

"This earth is ours, a field of Night
   For our petty flickering fires.
How shall it brook the sacred Light
   Or suffer a god's desires?

"Come, let us slay him and end his course!
   Then shall our hearts have release
From the burden and call of his glory and force
   And the curb of his wide white peace."

But the god is there in my mortal breast
   Who wrestles with error and fate
And tramples a road through mire and waste
   For the nameless Immaculate.

A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!
   Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
   And knock at the keyless gate."

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
   At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep
   On the Dragon's outspread wings.

I left the surface gauds of mind
   And life's unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body's alleys blind
   To the nether mysteries.

I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart
   And heard her black mass' bell.
I have seen the source whence her agonies part
   And the inner reason of hell.

Above me the dragon murmurs moan
   And the goblin voices flit;
I have pierced the Void where Thought was born,
   I have walked in the bottomless pit.

On a desperate stair my feet have trod
   Armoured with boundless peace,
Bringing the fires of the splendour of God
   Into the human abyss.

He who I am was with me still;
   All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
   On my vast untroubled brow.

The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
   And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged
   And glimmer from shore to shore.

Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth
   And the undying suns here burn;
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
   The incarnate spirits yearn

Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
   Down a gold-red stairway wend
The radiant children of Paradise
   Clarioning darkness' end.

A little more and the new life's doors
   Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
   In a great world bare and bright.

I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,
   For in a raiment of gold and blue
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
   The living truth of you.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, 534,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove
2:in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove
3:No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove
4:I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove
5:No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove
6:I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove
7:Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove
8:He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove
9:To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee— ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove
10:It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove
11:How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove
12:Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove
13:You may repeat the most marvelous poems. And that is not worth a cent if you don't live it. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove
14:You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove
15:One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove
16:I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove
17:... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove
18:Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove
19:The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove
20:I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet. ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove
21:Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove
22:For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove
23:Some poems are like the Centaurs&
24:Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove
25:the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; most people are snobs. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove
26:Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove
27:Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove
28:My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove
29:My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove
30:In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove
31:Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
32:For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove
33:He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove
34:Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove
35:Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove
36:One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove
37:As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove
38:It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove
39:It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove
40:In one of his poems Walt Whitman announces: It is time to explain myself – let us stand up. What is known I strip away, I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove
41:May Moorland weavers boast Pindaric skill, And tailors' lays be longer than their bill! While punctual beaux reward the grateful notes, And pay for poems&
42:One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer,... . The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove
43:Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove
44:The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove
45:One of my favorite Sufi poems... says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove
46:Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove
47:Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove
48:I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove
49:I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove
50:You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove
51:I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove
52:&
53:Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove
54:Poems On Love Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom. Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it. Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove
55:If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove
56:All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove
57:A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove
58:We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove
59:Poems On Life: Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it. Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love. Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole. Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove
60:Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too." ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove
61:When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove
62:Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove
63:It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove
64:I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove
65:We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove
66:Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove
67:Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove
68:Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint... They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove
69:My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and &
70:And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:WINGS LOVE: POEMS ~ Danielle Steel,
2:Lies belong in poems ~ Kenneth Koch,
3:This is what poems are: ~ Anne Sexton,
4:...hatching his poems.. ~ Susanna Clarke,
5:Listen to presences inside poems. ~ Rumi,
6:My poems are like a dagger ~ Jose Marti,
7:My poems please the brave: ~ Jose Marti,
8:101 Greatest Romantic Poems ~ Bill Farrel,
9:In your beauty, how to make poems. ~ Rumi,
10:Listen to presences inside poems, ~ Rumi,
11:That's what poems are for, ~ Tess Gallagher,
12:Many of my poems are not sexual. ~ Thom Gunn,
13:If you like my poems let them ~ e e cummings,
14:I write poems to figure things out ~ Sarah Kay,
15:I do not know how to make poems ~ Henri Michaux,
16:Poems are made by fools like me, ~ Joyce Kilmer,
17:Will slams poems; I slam doors. ~ Colleen Hoover,
18:Leaving Verses Poems Quotes ~ John Walter Bratton,
19:Each man has his own batch of poems. ~ Saul Bellow,
20:Poems aren't postcards to send home. ~ Anne Sexton,
21:The fatal problem with poetry: poems. ~ Ben Lerner,
22:Will slam poems and I slam doors. ~ Colleen Hoover,
23:Birds are poems I haven't caught yet ~ Jim Harrison,
24:They compose poems to their knives. ~ Frank Herbert,
25:Title deeds generally outlast poems. ~ Mason Cooley,
26:Have you sipped your poems today? ~ Helvy Tiana Rosa,
27:My poems are naughty, but my life is pure. ~ Martial,
28:Poems are difficult to silence. ~ Stephen Greenblatt,
29:Truly great poems never do, somehow. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
30:I have seen the universe! It is made of poems! ~ Sj n,
31:I like Beethoven, especially the poems. ~ Ringo Starr,
32:Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing ~ Ralph Fletcher,
33:Poems come from incomplete knowledge. ~ Diane Wakoski,
34:I will fill the poems with great pain ~ Dorothea Lasky,
35:Poems are invisible flowers on my skin. ~ Sanober Khan,
36:Poems are rough notations for the music we are. ~ Rumi,
37:Poems are never finished - just abandoned ~ Paul Val ry,
38:The ear writes my poems, not the mind. ~ Stanley Kunitz,
39:There are no honest poems about dead women. ~ Audre Lorde,
40:No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems! ~ Andy Richter,
41:Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. ~ Patti Smith,
42:All good poems are victories over something. ~ Stephen Dunn,
43:I like poems that are daggers that sing. ~ Frederick Seidel,
44:I write poems to find out why I write them ~ Stephen Dobyns,
45:poems are small moments of enlightenment ~ Natalie Goldberg,
46:Some poems are art because of their passion. ~ Gerald Stern,
47:There are either poems about sex/love or God. ~ Robert Hass,
48:I know wherever you are, there are poems. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva,
49:It is difficult to get the news from poems ~ Alain de Botton,
50:Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. ~ Gregory Corso,
51:If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. ~ Rumi,
52:you and the poems have a lot to talk about. ~ Nayyirah Waheed,
53:All the poems of our lives are not yet made. ~ Muriel Rukeyser,
54:For you
i have saved poems
under my skin. ~ Sanober Khan,
55:I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face! ~ George Eliot,
56:Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing. ~ Lucille Clifton,
57:Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure. ~ Anne Sexton,
58:Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. ~ Stephane Mallarme,
59:I still read Donne, particularly his love poems ~ Carol Ann Duffy,
60:I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. ~ Mary Oliver,
61:No indeed, poems were not made out of intentions. ~ Kingsley Amis,
62:I write poems like some people sing in the bathroom. ~ Amit Bhatia,
63:No, I don't think poems will save us. And yet, and yet ~ Sarah Kay,
64:He does not write at all whose poems no man reads ~ Marcus Aurelius,
65:I am welcome in the world of words, stories, poems. ~ Hannah Howard,
66:"Poems are rough notations for the music we are." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,
67:Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. ~ Khalil Gibran,
68:Half-closes her eyes — eyelids heavy with
poems. ~ Anna Akhmatova,
69:in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems ~ E E Cummings,
70:in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems ~ e e cummings,
71:Lineation can make your break your poems. ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer,
72:I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down ~ John Clare,
73:And if I die, then who
Will write my poems to you? ~ Anna Akhmatova,
74:Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down. ~ Angela Thirkell,
75:Poems were never meant to be forced into commands. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
76:For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly. ~ Langston Hughes,
77:My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud. ~ James Arthur,
78:My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls. ~ Gunter Brus,
79:Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know. ~ Muriel Rukeyser,
80:My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy. ~ Frank O Hara,
81:When the poems don’t come, don’t open the vodka. ~ Clementine von Radics,
82:I only submit the poems I think are the strongest. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
83:I think it's better if you write poems that look like you. ~ Richard Hugo,
84:There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. ~ Roberto Bolano,
85:There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. ~ Roberto Bola o,
86:But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. ~ Sylvia Plath,
87:I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down. ~ John Clare,
88:It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God. ~ Robert Bly,
89:I've always wanted editors that actually edited my poems. ~ Victoria Chang,
90:We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe. ~ Erica Jong,
91:all my life
i have looked for poems

to elope with. ~ Sanober Khan,
92:He kisses like a poet. Like he's writing poems on my lips. ~ Veronica Rossi,
93:Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself. ~ Philip Larkin,
94:Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate. ~ Marvin Bell,
95:Girls like poems better than dead dragons and magic swords, ~ Peter S Beagle,
96:Having examined three thousand haiku poems - two persimmons. ~ Masaoka Shiki,
97:I thought poems were songs for people with bad voices. ~ Lorna Dee Cervantes,
98:No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers ~ Horace,
99:Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems. ~ Maxine Kumin,
100:By men is mightiness achieved ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,
101:No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers. ~ Horace,
102:We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. ~ Thom Gunn,
103:Am I going to die and all I will have are these fucking poems ~ Dorothea Lasky,
104:Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake. ~ Ron Loewinsohn,
105:By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. ~ W H Auden,
106:Goethe's poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames. ~ Bernhard Schlink,
107:I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow. ~ Martin Gore,
108:That's what poems are for, so you don't understand a thing. ~ Tatyana Tolstaya,
109:all the words
all the poems
know
my warm, soft spots. ~ Sanober Khan,
110:in you
are poems
that aren't meant
to be read by everyone ~ R H Sin,
111:listen to my poems
but do not look for me
look for you. ~ Nayyirah Waheed,
112:If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time. ~ Sherman Alexie,
113:I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of. ~ Robert Frost,
114:I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible. ~ Billy Collins,
115:Poems arrive ready to begin.
Poets are only the transportation. ~ Mary Oliver,
116:whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best. ~ Randall Jarrell,
117:All that we meet is a symbol and gateway ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
118:Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will. ~ Honore de Balzac,
119:I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems ~ Philip Larkin,
120:Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
121:Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye,
122:Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people. ~ Anna Akhmatova,
123:The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science. ~ Walt Whitman,
124:When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot. ~ Cate Marvin,
125:After ‘tis cold, none heeds, none hinders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
126:I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. ~ Robert Frost,
127:I don’t know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us. ~ Linh Dinh,
128:I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems. ~ Matthea Harvey,
129:...some of the best love poems have been written by monks and nuns... ~ John Geddes,
130:Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is. ~ Robert Bly,
131:I'm sorry for the poems.
All the shouting I did about your mouth. ~ Trista Mateer,
132:I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come. ~ Tom Paulin,
133:No one I am, I who am all that is. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,
134:Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. ~ Adrienne Rich,
135:I've burnt all the holy pages I used to carry
but poems flare in my heart ~ Ikkyu,
136:I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us ~ Jack Kerouac,
137:I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak. ~ Andrea Gibson,
138:my poems are only bits of scratching
on the floor of a
cage. ~ Charles Bukowski,
139:Poems are soft kitten furs. smoothing out the rough edges of my world. ~ Sanober Khan,
140:Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,
141:There was no text. “Real” poems do not “really” require words. I ~ Layli Long Soldier,
142:One cannot write poems about trees when the forest is full of police. ~ Bertolt Brecht,
143:The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
144:Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds. ~ Amiri Baraka,
145:Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ Virginia Woolf,
146:Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly. ~ Anne Stevenson,
147:Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel. ~ Marilyn Hacker,
148:I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck,
149:I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own. ~ Andre Naffis Sahely,
150:IT was for delight
He sought existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
151:Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. ~ Northrop Frye,
152:some bodies can't be touched/some poems
cannot be written/just felt ~ Kai Cheng Thom,
153:For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future. ~ Anne Waldman,
154:My life is a throb of Thy eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity,
155:Poems are like people' I said 'There are not many authentic ones around. ~ Robert Graves,
156:You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen. ~ Bertolt Brecht,
157:My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. ~ Philip Levine,
158:The grand style is available now only in old poems, museums, and parodies. ~ Mason Cooley,
159:Beauty of our dim soul is amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us,
160:Be silent now. Say fewer and fewer praise poems. Let yourself become living poetry. ~ Rumi,
161:He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
162:I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume. ~ Grazia Deledda,
163:They’re called poems but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to ~ John Trudell,
164:We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. ~ John Fowles,
165:I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that's what life is like. ~ John Green,
166:I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. ~ Joan Miro,
167:Necessity rules all the infinite world, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Birth of Sin,
168:Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. ~ Philip Larkin,
169:Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough. ~ Thomas Lynch,
170:Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action. ~ Raoul Vaneigem,
171:You’re speaking volumes, my friend, and tonight we’re doing short poems only. ~ Andr Aciman,
172:I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. ~ Eileen Myles,
173:Man’s mind is the dupe of his animal self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour,
174:Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems ~ Walt Whitman,
175:I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems. ~ Tiffany Foxx,
176:if you memorize three hundred Tang poems, you might be able to write a little. ~ Qiu Xiaolong,
177:I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems. ~ Jim Harrison,
178:It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,
179:Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems. ~ Karl Shapiro,
180:People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all. ~ Petra Haden,
181:Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke #poetry,
182:The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems. ~ Stanley Kunitz,
183:The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems. ~ Antonio Machado,
184:Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love. ~ Richard Hugo,
185:Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off. ~ Matthea Harvey,
186:I am an epitome of opposites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man, the Despot of Contraries,
187:I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems. ~ David Almond,
188:I still write poems for you the same way other people bring flowers to graves. ~ Trista Mateer,
189:Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world. ~ Frances Mayes,
190:The machines are too dull when we
are lion-poems that move & breathe. ~ Michael McClure,
191:There isn't enough paper in the world to write all the poems you inspire in me. ~ Rae D Magdon,
192:Would I that cowlèd churchman be. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Problem", Poems (1847), Stanza 1,
193:You write poems
because you need
a place
where what isn’t may be ~ Alejandra Pizarnik,
194:All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them. ~ John Fowles,
195:And all grows beautiful because Thou art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing,
196:I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. ~ John Ashbery,
197:Louise Glück’s Ararat dissects family relationships in starkly beautiful poems. ~ Kim Addonizio,
198:Poetry is a useful place for lamentation...poems are a place where we can cry out. ~ bell hooks,
199:The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems. ~ Chet Raymo,
200:There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel,
201:All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
202:I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. ~ Seamus Heaney,
203:I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box. ~ Anne Sexton,
204:Let there be no love poems written
Until love can exist freely and
Cleanly. ~ Amiri Baraka,
205:My body a dot in the soul’s vast expanse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self’s Infinity,
206:The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning. ~ Nikki Giovanni,
207:I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won't work. ~ Joy Harjo,
208:I have no talent. I write poems for myself, to think things through, that’s all. ~ Anna Kamienska,
209:In my heart’s chamber lives the unworshipped God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
210:Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book. ~ Simon Winchester,
211:Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language. ~ Matthea Harvey,
212:even the small poems mean something. they are often whales in the bodies of tiny fish. ~ Anonymous,
213:I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind. ~ Edward Hirsch,
214:I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays. ~ Lena Dunham,
215:Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials. ~ Anna Journey,
216:Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
217:Necessity fashions
All that the unseen eye has beheld. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
218:That’s what poems are for,
unlivable love."

epigraph to “In Lilac-Light ~ Tess Gallagher,
219:The golden virgin, Usha, mother of life,
Yet virgin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
220:The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends. ~ Robert Bly,
221:To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee— ~ Emily Dickinson,
222:Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. ~ Thom Gunn,
223:I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. ~ Alex Lemon,
224:Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope. ~ Theodore Roszak,
225:Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my Friend. ~ Martial,
226:The only happy people in the world
are those who do not have to write long poems ~ John Berryman,
227:The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet. ~ Yehuda Amichai,
228:An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream. ~ A S Byatt,
229:Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
230:I don’t know,” Oskar said. “I found it in a book of Annieran poems. Very valuable. ~ Andrew Peterson,
231:Poems have their own fates, like children. You have only to give birth to them. ~ Andrei Voznesensky,
232:Sandra Kasturi's magical poems transform the ordinary into the surreal and exotic. ~ Phyllis Gotlieb,
233:Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Thought the Paraclete,
234:To our gaze God’s light is a darkness, His plan is a chaos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
235:A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
236:Alone the wise Can walk through fire with unblinking eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epigram,
237:collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks. ~ Richard Rhodes,
238:Eviller fate there is none than life too long among mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
239:For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing. ~ Robin Morgan,
240:Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten. ~ Rachel Zucker,
241:she's got
oceans
tucked away
in her hair

poems swim
under her skin. ~ Sanober Khan,
242:Creations, whether they are children, poems, or organizations, take on a life of their own. ~ Starhawk,
243:I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems. ~ Wis awa Szymborska,
244:Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
245:Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. ~ W S Merwin,
246:My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self’s Infinity,
247:Plus, dreams don't have to be logical, do they? Dreams are poems from the subconscious. ~ Stephen King,
248:The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way. ~ Dan Beachy Quick,
249:We are the heirs of infinite widenesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Call of the Impossible,
250:We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written. ~ Tristan Tzara,
251:Heavy is godhead to bear with its mighty sun-burden of lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
252:I keep all my poems in my journals and lock them away. They are the start of everything. ~ Stevie Nicks,
253:I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems. ~ David Almond,
254:Like all art, poems are only hints and guesses that draw our attention to something larger. ~ Luci Shaw,
255:Sometimes,' she said, remembering that morning, 'I write poems that are taller than I am ~ Rumer Godden,
256:Dreams are debris from bad day. Dreams are poems by bad poets that never got written. ~ Tadeusz Konwicki,
257:even the small poems mean something. they are often whales in the bodies of tiny fish. ~ Nayyirah Waheed,
258:Heavenly voices to us are a silence, those colours a whiteness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
259:I don’t know why I didn’t carry around pictures and poems all the time before I came here. ~ Ally Condie,
260:I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. ~ Honor de Balzac,
261:I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals. ~ Philip Larkin,
262:In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems. ~ Henri Cole,
263:I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. ~ Donald Hall,
264:I was born doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are. ~ Anne Sexton,
265:To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—
True Poems flee— ~ Emily Dickinson,
266:Each is a mass of forces thrown in shape. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Discoveries of Science - III,
267:Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn, the Everlasting, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
268:God still keeps
Near to a paler world the hour ere dawn ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,
269:I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them. ~ Maxine Kumin,
270:I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. ~ Honore de Balzac,
271:Life’s whole
Tremendous theorem is Thou complete. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
272:Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

("Writing," New Poems Book Three) ~ Charles Bukowski,
273:The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere. ~ Paul Celan,
274:There is an hour for knowledge, an hour to forget and to labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
275:This is what the poems are for: telling other people the things I can no longer tell you. ~ Trista Mateer,
276:Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. ~ Mark Strand,
277:Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
278:And all the while within us works His love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
279:By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow. ~ Brian Ferneyhough,
280:Hard are God’s terms and few can meet them of men who are mortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
281:If the poems
please you more than my lips,
I will never give you another kiss. ~ Juan Ram n Jim nez,
282:Is here and in the pleasant house He chose
To harbour God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
283:I wish all difficult poems were profound. Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound. ~ Ben Lerner,
284:I write small poems—
the kind that fit on a postcard…
and still can break your heart ~ John Geddes,
285:Mind is His wax to write and, written, rase
Form and name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
286:The sweet vast centre and the cave divine
Called Paradise, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
287:And in the heart of the worst the best shall be born by my wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
288:Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide. ~ Jack Nicholson,
289:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
290:He who to some gives victory, joy and good,
To some gives rest. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
291:His good and evil, sin and virtue, till
He bids thee leave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
292:His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity. ~ Agatha Christie,
293:It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will. ~ Horace,
294:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
295:Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
296:When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature. ~ Lisel Mueller,
297:Clouds from Zeus come and pass; his sunshine eternal survives them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
298:I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming,
299:The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest. ~ Wilhelm Reich,
300:Two are the angels of God whom men worship, strength and enjoyment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
301:- Why are your poems so different from one another?
- Because the years are different. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva,
302:Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions. ~ Anne Stevenson,
303:All things embrace in death and the strife and the hatred are ended. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
304:A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth’s pain; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
305:But there is never any end when one has loved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
306:I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems. ~ Joan Larkin,
307:Man his passion prefers to the voice that guides from the immortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
308:The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. ~ Stan Brakhage,
309:You cannot utterly die while the Power lives untired in your bosoms; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
310:If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough. ~ Jane Campion,
311:In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said. ~ Mary Karr,
312:Later on I published these poems as Sappho’s Boat to make damn sure everyone knew what I meant. ~ Eileen Myles,
313:Poems can get
sleepless too

and become

the loneliest thing
in the universe. ~ Sanober Khan,
314:Surely the steel grows dear in the land when a traitor can flourish.” ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
315:Epics are narrative poems that recount the story of a hero who represents a particular culture. ~ DK Publishing,
316:How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. ~ Charles Bukowski,
317:I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality. ~ Matthea Harvey,
318:Love the sign
Of one outblaze of godhead that two share. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
319:My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets. ~ Rita Dove,
320:The esoteric finds the Absolute within the traditions, as poets find poetry within the poems. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
321:Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder ~ Bob Dylan,
322:Fearless of death they must walk who would live and be mighty for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
323:My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint. ~ Helen Dunmore,
324:Nobler must kings be than natures of earth on whom Zeus lays no burden. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
325:One of Milton’s poems contains the well-known line “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth. ~ Bill Bryson,
326:The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words. ~ Sylvia Plath,
327:Through glorious things and base the wheel of God
For ever runs. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
328:You may repeat the most marvelous poems. And that is not worth a cent if you don't live it. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
329:I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too. ~ Jackie Evancho,
330:Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan,
331:some poems froth
and foam and rise...

out of my morning cup of
mist-sweetened coffee. ~ Sanober Khan,
332:Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack. ~ Ho Chi Minh,
333:Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
334:How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. ~ Charles Bukowski,
335:Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems. ~ Cate Marvin,
336:Well, yes: people write poems when they are in love, but a wise man will not print them. ~ Hans Christian Andersen,
337:You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems. ~ Walt Disney,
338:I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author. ~ Cate Marvin,
339:One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced. ~ John Dryden,
340:Remember,
a stranger once told you that the breeze
here is something worth writing poems about. ~ Shinji Moon,
341:The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories. ~ Saki,
342:There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear. ~ Cate Marvin,
343:Alike ‘tis heaven,
Rule or obedience to the one heart given. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,
344:Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas. ~ Tracy K Smith,
345:Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. ~ Paul Celan,
346:The harpy’s eyes were wide with wonder. “So that’s Adriyel. No wonder it’s famous in poems and shit. ~ Thea Harrison,
347:Yea, the soul of a man too is mighty
More than the stone and the mortar! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
348:You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble ~ Charles Olson,
349:All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Strong Son of Lightning,
350:I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs. ~ Gregory Harrison,
351:I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ Virginia Woolf,
352:The abode
Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
353:There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. ~ Philip Levine,
354:Thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
355:Credence, when mediocrity multiplied
Equals itself with genius. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,
356:For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything. ~ Langston Hughes,
357:... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. ~ Mary Oliver,
358:What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? Oh, poems, no less! Poems, everybody! ~ Roger Waters,
359:your smile.
is the ultimate
golden dream.
all the poems
in the world
are waking up from. ~ Sanober Khan,
360:He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like nipple. ~ Jean Thompson,
361:I tell my students to think of poems as language plus, language with value added beyond its everyday use. ~ Monica Youn,
362:Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. ~ Donald Hall,
363:The Self of things is not their outward view,
A Force within decides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,
364:While war for love is inspiring in legends and epic poems, we must be governed by cynical pragmatism. ~ James L Cambias,
365:Each finite is that deep Infinity
Enshrining His veiled soul of pure delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,
366:Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood. ~ Albert Einstein,
367:I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time. ~ Matthew Zapruder,
368:I have found the title of the book as impossible to forget as the poems in it were impossible to remember. ~ Clive James,
369:I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem. ~ Mark Nepo,
370:I've written poems about gifts. Life is inspirational; sometimes it comes from the most unlikely places. ~ Ama Ata Aidoo,
371:Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. ~ E L Doctorow,
372:There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. ~ Roberto Bola o,
373:Helped are the souls that wait more than strengths soon fulfilled and exhausted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
374:I am a performing artist; I perfomr admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same ~ Mary Oliver,
375:I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same ~ Mary Oliver,
376:It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense. ~ David Benioff,
377:Love and memory and thought and dream ~ Kij Johnson
My favorite poems have never been written in words. ~ Kij Johnson,
378:Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories. ~ Billy Graham,
379:The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written. ~ Wallace Stevens,
380:The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. ~ T S Eliot,
381:young portress bright
Who opens to our souls the worlds of light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,
382:Easy are mortal
Hearts to be bent by Fate and soon we consent to our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
383:I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet. ~ Lewis Carroll,
384:I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual. ~ Matthea Harvey,
385:In our time, they say there is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this.
This is the penalty. ~ Muriel Rukeyser,
386:Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings. ~ Nikki Giovanni,
387:She loved to read her old poems. They are like photographs, she thought. There’s so much evidence of me. ~ Leopoldine Core,
388:The poems are all wrong.
It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper.
And sometimes gold can stay. ~ Kami Garcia,
389:There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men. ~ Germaine Greer,
390:Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. ~ Alice Walker,
391:I move in an ocean of stupendous Light
Joining my depths to His eternal height. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,
392:More or Less Love Poems #11: No babe We'd never Swing together but the syncopation would be something wild ~ Diane di Prima,
393:This body which was once my universe,
Is now a pittance carried by the soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Body,
394:Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems. ~ Peter Bichsel,
395:All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight,
O Absolute, O vivid Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Divine Sight,
396:Fate,
The dim great presence, is but nature made
Irrevocable in its fruits. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
397:Good we have made by our thoughts and sin by our fear and recoiling; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
398:If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? ~ Jennifer Weiner,
399:I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems. ~ Billy Collins,
400:Literary' feelings are responses to poems, not just states of emotion which occur in their presence. ~ Terry Eagleton,
401:Only the past fulfilled can conjure room to the future that presses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
402:There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
403:Transmuted is ravishment’s minister,
A high note and a fiery refrain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
404:A perfect face amid barbarian faces,
A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Goethe,
405:Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death-blast and storm-race. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
406:I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did. ~ Robert Hass,
407:I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first. ~ Jack Prelutsky,
408:My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable. ~ Anne Sexton,
409:Nor punishes. Impartially he deals
To every strenuous spirit its chosen reward. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
410:Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
411:The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones. ~ Andrea Gibson,
412:We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet. ~ Michael Palin,
413:For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,
414:I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer! ~ Anne Sexton,
415:I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems. ~ Arnold Adoff,
416:My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them. ~ Lydia Davis,
417:To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem. ~ Pattiann Rogers,
418:You too?" She asked Ruth. "How do your poems start out?"

"They start as a lump in the throat," she said. ~ Louise Penny,
419:A Silence that was Being’s only word,
The unknown beginning and the voiceless end ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,
420:O worshipper of the formless Infinite,
    Reject not form, what dwells in it is He. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,
421:When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away. ~ Chath Piersath,
422:I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
423:In his former life though, as the cool guy, he would never have picked up a book, especially one with poems in it. ~ Shaun Meeks,
424:In us the secret Spirit can indite
A page and summary of the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,
425:It is not enough for poems to be beautiful; they must be affecting, and must lead the heart of the hearer as they will. ~ Horace,
426:One who has made in sport the suns and seas
Mirrors in our being his immense caprice. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,
427:Poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear form, filled with words that could wound with their beauty. ~ Neil Gaiman,
428:Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog
Can, if He will, show equal godhead. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,
429:The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories. ~ Hector Hugh Munro,
430:The words of the letter had long since been whisked away by time, but the poems he kept prisoner in his heart. ~ Felix Alexander,
431:Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing? ~ Ernst Haas,
432:Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
433:Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express. ~ Erica Jong,
434:The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
435:The world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun
Draping the unanimity of the One. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Contrasts,
436:They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets. ~ J D Salinger,
437:This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now.
I get it, and I want more. ~ Laini Taylor,
438:A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway
Upholds the mystery of this Passion-play. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,
439:Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits
The pure heart as the stained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
440:April

It's impossible
To write poems
If you're in love
And not to
If the month is April ~ Orhan Veli Kan k,
441:It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
442:It was a page he had Found in the handbook Of heartbreak. Wallace Stevens, “Madame la Fleurie,” Collected Poems I ~ Cornelia Funke,
443:Men are fathers of their fate;
They dig the prison, they the crown command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,
444:The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year. ~ Patricia McConnell,
445:We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough. ~ Carl Sandburg,
446:All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,
447:A painter can turn pennies into gold, for all subjects are capable of being transformed into poems. ~ Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,
448:How many poems must you write to convince yourself you have a family? Everyone leaves and you end up the stranger. ~ Fatimah Asghar,
449:I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all. ~ Cate Marvin,
450:My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo,
451:Our consciousness a torch that plays Between the Abyss and a supernal Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator,
452:Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. ~ Richard Eberhart,
453:A World-adventurer borne on Destiny’s wing
Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,
454:No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.
Thy presence is my immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
455:The Master of man and his infinite Lover,
He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
456:To whatsoever living form I turn
I see my own body with another face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
457:WANT TO DO WITH YOU WHAT SPRING DOES WITH THE CHERRY TREES.” Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair * ~ Chance Carter,
458:While you’ve been away, I’ve been copying poems out in a book so that I could whisper them to you as you fell asleep. ~ Paulo Coelho,
459:As with the figure of a symbol dance
The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,
460:Babies are like poems. They're beautiful to their creator, but to other people, they're silly and they're irritating. ~ Doug Stanhope,
461:Each finite thing I see is a façade;
From its windows looks at me the Illimitable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
462:Hidden in an earthly garment that survives,
I am the worldless being vast and free. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Immortality,
463:Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. ~ Colson Whitehead,
464:Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,
465:Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems. ~ Mary Oliver,
466:It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. ~ William Carlos Williams,
467:Kali (Iron Lords of Time)
Am love, am passion; I create the world.
I am the only Brahma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,
468:The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
469:The worst
is when people - knowingly or not -
carry prison inside themselves.

- 9-10 P.M. Poems ~ N z m Hikmet Ran,
470:Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
471:He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme. ~ Ann Aguirre,
472:He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master. ~ Matsuo Basho,
473:It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
474:My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out." ~ Denise Duhamel,
475:Out, out with the mind and its candle flares,
Light, light the suns that never die. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,
476:Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language. ~ Mary Oliver,
477:She's the kind of girl that songs should be written about, poems should be composed for, and books should be dedicated to. ~ Kiera Cass,
478:The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
479:The impossible is the hint of what shall be,
Mortal the door to immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us,
480:the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. ~ E E Cummings,
481:the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. ~ e e cummings,
482:In vain was my prison of separate body made;
His occult presence burns in every cell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
483:I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more. ~ Wendy Cope,
484:I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. ~ Oscar Wilde,
485:My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time. ~ Yehuda Amichai,
486:Nothing in all those "O swan" poems had ever mentioned that they hissed. Or resented being mistaken for felines. Or bit. ~ Connie Willis,
487:She tells me words give people permission to be their fullest self and aren't these the poems I most needed to hear? ~ Elizabeth Acevedo,
488:The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous. ~ Eileen Myles,
489:The darkness was the Omnipotent’s abode,
Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,
490:Children are like poems. They're beautiful -- to their creators -- but to others they're just silly and fucking annoying. ~ Doug Stanhope,
491:How many poems did I not write?
They hang in the air around me, a weird choir,
And some day
May suffocate me... ~ Anna Akhmatova,
492:I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing. ~ Patti Smith,
493:The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. ~ Audre Lorde,
494:The words we construct, the poems we write and the songs we sing, become the love story of a stranger we have never seen. ~ M F Moonzajer,
495:A spark of the eternal Fire, it came
To build a house in Matter for the Unborn. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
496:…girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those “in the know” assured me that they were beautiful. ~ Jake Vander Ark,
497:He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,
And does what Matter must or Spirit can. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Enigma,
498:Mystic daughter of Delight,
Life, thou ecstasy,
Let the radius of thy flight
Be eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life,
499:Naked my spirit from its vestures stands;
I am alone with my own self for space. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self’s Infinity,
500:poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed m ~ William Shakespeare,
501:Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds
And metres surging with the ocean’s voice ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame,
502:When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
503:Chaff are men’s armies
Threshed by the flails of Fate; ‘tis the soul of the hero that conquers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
504:I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world. ~ Matthea Harvey,
505:I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
506:I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem. ~ Amy Lowell,
507:In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Unseen Infinite,
508:In the night a million stars arise
To watch us with their ancient friendly eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Perigone Prologuises,
509:Our body is an epitome of some Vast
    That masks its presence by our humanness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,
510:Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach
Greatness to our divine Bengali speech. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Madhusudan Dutt,
511:The blue sea dances like a girl
With sapphire and with pearl
Crowning her locks. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
512:There is a need within the soul of man
    The splendours of the surface never sate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,
513:Thy golden Light came down into my feet;
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Golden Light,
514:Time voyages with Thee upon its prow,—
And all the future’s passionate hope is Thou. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,
515:Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. ~ A R Ammons,
516:Immeasurable ecstasy where Time
And Space have fainted in a swoon sublime! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
517:I've written and translated my own poems from English to German. It's basically a summation of my identity as it stands now. ~ Masiela Lusha,
518:Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book... ~ Pattiann Rogers,
519:Rod McKuen. One of his poems says something
about it not mattering who you love but the important thing is that you love, ~ Carolyn Brown,
520:The poems and stories we shared with each other could mean what we wanted them to mean. We could choose our own path together. ~ Ally Condie,
521:There's something to walking with autumnal thoughts through the evening fog. One likes to compose poems at a time like that. ~ Hermann Hesse,
522:they stood together under the dome of the Grand Portico, with the indecipherable art of love poems giving silent testament. • ~ Ren e Ahdieh,
523:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness. ~ Khalil Gibran,
524:Death is but changing of our robes to wait
In wedding garments at the Eternal’s gate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,
525:Impassive, I bear each act and thought and mood:
Time traverses my hushed infinitude. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,
526:my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely. ~ Tove Ditlevsen,
527:Not alone the mind in its trouble
God beholds, but the spirit behind that has joy of the torture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
528:Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life. ~ Henry Ward Beecher,
529:She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides,
530:God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. ~ W H Auden,
531:Gradually I became aware that professing English because I loved poems was like practicing vivisection because I loved dogs. ~ Michael Donaghy,
532:I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense. ~ Matthea Harvey,
533:In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms - Möbius strips and visual poems, particularly. ~ Denise Duhamel,
534:It's not Adventureland, but you write some poems, the leaves move, and you get laid sometimes." Tom Drury's Pierre Hunter on life. ~ Tom Drury,
535:Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises. ~ Rumi,
536:Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. ~ Seamus Heaney,
537:More or Less Love Poems #11:

No babe
We'd never
Swing together but
the syncopation
would be something wild ~ Diane di Prima,
538:Nia smiled. “You have no need to apologize, Oskar. Remembering Alma is good for my heart. Do you know any more of her poems? ~ Andrew Peterson,
539:some winters
will never melt

some summers
will never freeze

and some things will only
... live in poems. ~ Sanober Khan,
540:Strength men desire in their masters;
All men worship success and in failure and weakness abandon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
541:There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German. ~ Paul Celan,
542:An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Despair on the Staircase,
543:If progress is not the right word for buildings or poems, what is the right way to evaluate cultural change? I suggest integrity. ~ Andy Crouch,
544:I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?. ~ Betsy Lerner,
545:OMG! I DESIGNED THIS NEW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM! IT'S CALLED "POETRY" - YOU HAVE TO READ AMY KING'S POEMS TO GET AN INVITE ~ Amy King ~ Amy King,
546:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness. ~ Kahlil Gibran,
547:Unborn I sit, timeless, intangible:
All things are shadows in my tranquil glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
548:As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose,
Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Silver Call,
549:A Witness dwells within our secrecies,
The incarnate Godhead in the body of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
550:I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people. ~ Robert Graves,
551:Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
552:What Robert Bly's poetry readings say is: "You must change your life." To hear serious poems and resist all change is dangerous. ~ William Booth,
553:Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
554:Forewilled by the gods, Alexander,
All things happen on earth and yet we must strive who are mortals, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
555:In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
556:I recall that one time he told the people to read the poems out loud because the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness. ~ Tom s Rivera,
557:O Thou who climb’dst to mind from the dull stone,
Face now the miracled summits still unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
558:Words are like breath,” she said. “You say them and they’re gone. But writing traps them. You could write down stories, poems. ~ Bernard Cornwell,
559:A death that eats and eating is devoured,
This is the brutal image of the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
560:Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant. ~ Hugh Kenner,
561:Kama (Desire)
My desire
Takes many forms; I change and wheel and race,
And with Me runs creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,
562:Life only is, or death is life disguised,—
Life a short death until by life we are surprised. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life and Death,
563:Like common men he lived to whom the ray
Of a new sun but brings another day
Unmeaning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,
564:My mind has left its prison-camp of brain;
It pours, a luminous sea from spirit heights. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Sovereign,
565:My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands. ~ Bob Dylan,
566:My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl;
I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
567:She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard. ~ Pat Conroy,
568:To perish is better for man or for nation
Nobly in battle, nor end disgraced by disease or subjection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
569:Why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it's our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two. ~ Nicola Yoon,
570:Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt. ~ Nikki Giovanni,
571:for S.—   I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters, but I always seem to lay us out bare. Sorry for the poems. ~ Trista Mateer,
572:Human bodies are words, myriads of words; In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped,         natural, gay; ~ Walt Whitman,
573:I had never heard of Rumi until Robert Bly handed me this book and he said, ah, “These poems need to be released from their cages.” ~ Coleman Barks,
574:It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there. ~ William Carlos Williams,
575:I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there. ~ Kacey Musgraves,
576:Let the whole world end now, since all for whichIt was created is fulfilled at lastAnd I am swallowed up in thee, O God. ~ Sri AurobindoShort Poems,
577:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
   We fell them down and turn them into paper,
   That we may record our emptiness.
   ~ Kahlil Gibran,
578:Clarity Cliche--polished package
that wraps the unwrappable
Here it is, your day

from "Nightly News" in The News: Poems ~ Jeffrey Brown,
579:Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator. ~ Daniel Handler,
580:Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator. ~ Lemony Snicket,
581:I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand. ~ David Antin,
582:I have been transcribing those poems and considering how lucky we are to live longer than flowers, even if not much happens to us. ~ Kate Bernheimer,
583:I know, basketball is a dance. I didn't understand the significance of that type of training at first. I was supposed to read poems. ~ Dirk Nowitzki,
584:In Damascus:
poems become diaphanous
They’re neither sensual
nor intellectual
they are what echo says
to echo . . . ~ Mahmoud Darwish,
585:I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci,
586:Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,
The Immortal’s gradual birth mid mire and stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
587:Yet is the dark Inconscient whence came all
The self-same Power that shines on high unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator,
588:I am the light in stars, of flowers
The bloom, the nameless fragrance that pervades
Creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
589:If your house has Cold Mountain poems They are better for you than sutras Hang them up where you can see them Read them and read them again ~ Hanshan,
590:I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts. ~ Mary Oliver,
591:Most poems I’ve seen are about love or sex or the stars. You poets are obsessed with stars. Falling stars. Shooting stars. Dying stars. ~ Nicola Yoon,
592:The poem was called “Goblin Market,” and the book whose proof pages were on the desk was titled Goblin Market and Other Poems. Christina ~ Tim Powers,
593:Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,
594:Burn it! Burn it. This is where the poems are,” I say, thumping a fist against my chest. “Will you burn me? Will you burn me, too? ~ Elizabeth Acevedo,
595:Busy our hearts are weaving thoughts and images always:
After their kind they see what here we call truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
596:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get—and never would get. ~ Anonymous,
597:It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad. ~ Randall Jarrell,
598:I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. ~ Nikki Giovanni,
599:Morning has pleasure, noon has golden peace
And afternoon repose and eve the heart’s increase. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
600:Not in this living net
Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind
Is a man’s manhood seated. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,
601:This world behind is made of truer stuff
        Than the manufactured tissue of earth’s grace. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Fields,
602:A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it. ~ Adrienne Rich,
603:I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind. ~ Gary Snyder,
604:I tried to write poems in rhyme. I tried writing songs. Sometimes I jotted down a thought. I would keep a log of spontaneous thoughts. ~ Chath Piersath,
605:Light, burning Light from the Infinite’s diamond heart
Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,
606:My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. ~ Dorothy Parker,
607:3/3 #WorldEnvironmentDay2020 Who intimately lives with rain.Poems are made by fools like me,But only God can make a tree.” ~ Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” 1914,
608:All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems, I turn my adventures into bread and butter. ~ Louisa May Alcott,
609:He sowed the desert with ruddy-hearted rose,
The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bankim Chandra Chatterji,
610:Human nature is universial, and it endures through all cultures and epochs. This is the secret of perenniality of certain poems and books. ~ Octavio Paz,
611:I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender. ~ Marvin Bell,
612:I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move. ~ Rita Dove,
613:I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words. ~ Kurt Cobain,
614:My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity. ~ Hayden Carruth,
615:The high gods watch in their silence,
Mute they endure for a while that the doom may be swifter and greater. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
616:There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement. ~ Caroline Kennedy,
617:They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field. ~ Saint John of the Cross, The Poems of St. John of the Cross,
618:Further, I’ve alluded to over thirty Poe stories, poems and essays in the novel, thus creating another puzzle for the reader to solve. ~ Karen Lee Street,
619:Poems. I tell ya, there were some great ones. The world, when it was early in the making and easy for the taking, was all poetry, man. ~ Logan Ryan Smith,
620:Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. ~ Joy Harjo,
621:Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
622:And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest. ~ Hisham Matar,
623:...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed. ~ Stanley Kunitz,
624:From: Poems To My Girls
How can Humanity
look the deer
in
the face?
How can Mommy,
having erected
my fence?
~ Alice Walker,
625:I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,
626:One hundred copies? Of these poems you do not even like?” asked the Roman. “They’re nasty bits about famous people; everyone will want them. ~ Karen Essex,
627:Only the illimitable Permanent
    Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
        Replaces all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,
628:Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life. ~ Matthea Harvey,
629:In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. ~ Confucius,
630:I would hear, in my spirit’s wideness solitary,
    The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,
631:Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs. ~ Kendrick Lamar,
632:Action Human and Divine
Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
633:Gesture (Mudra)
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine.
Time is my drama or my pageant dream. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,
634:It is always difficult for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend, but because their poems are bad. ~ Randall Jarrell,
635:Not by a little pain and not by a temperate labour
Trained is the nation chosen by Zeus for a dateless dominion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
636:Summer has pleasant comrades, happy meetings
Of lily and rose and from the trees divinest greetings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
637:Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two. ~ Nicola Yoon,
638:This is our human destiny; every moment of living
Toil and loss have gained in the constant siege of our bodies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
639:Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
After you know my poems are not poems,
Then we can begin to discuss poetry! ~ Taigu Ryokan,
640:All things yield to a man and Zeus is himself his accomplice
When like a god he wills without remorse or longing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
641:If I could rescue one of Li Bai's great poems but 10000000 spiritual slaves had to die in front of me with great violence, I wouldn't even blink. ~ Anonymous,
642:If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently? ~ James Arthur,
643:I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake. ~ James Arthur,
644:I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world. ~ Stanley Kunitz,
645:Only on the heart’s veiled door the word of flame
Is written, the secret and tremendous Name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
646:Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. ~ Natalie Goldberg,
647:When youth has quenched its soft and magic light,
Delightful things remain but dead is their delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
648:Count not life nor death, defeat nor triumph, Pyrrhus.
Only thy soul regard and the gods in thy joy or thy labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
649:I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world. ~ Seamus Heaney,
650:...if you eat my poems while they're still freshYou still have to bring forward many images yourself.These poems are not just old sayings... ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,
651:I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then. ~ Edward Hirsch,
652:The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose. ~ Edvard Munch,
653:The One devised innumerably to be;
His oneness in invisible forms he hides,
Time’s tiny temples to eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
654:We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling. ~ Ally Condie,
655:...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought... ~ John Geddes,
656:You get the best photos, the best literature, the best poems, the best art while working for your own pleasure with your own inner peace! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan,
657:Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
658:I Can Give Myself To Her
I can give myself to her
In her dreams
Whispering her own poems
In her ear as she sleeps beside me.
~ Akiko Yosano,
659:I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming,
660:My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence. ~ Anna Kamienska,
661:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,
662:So what
are your poems about? They're about
...
how nothing is about, they're not
about about.
--Heather McHugh, 20-200 on 747 ~ Heather McHugh,
663:When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you. ~ Muriel Rukeyser,
664:All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text. ~ Gary Snyder,
665:Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
666:I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems. ~ Pattiann Rogers,
667:No thought is vain; our very dreams
Substantial are;
The light we see in fancy, yonder gleams
In the star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
668:Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization. ~ Wallace Stegner,
669:When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police. ~ Langston Hughes,
670:And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. ~ Donna George Storey,
671:A sole thing the Gods
Demand from all men living, sacrifice:
Nor without this shall any crown be grasped. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
672:But love of one kind will never duplicate itself. Love has its variety...which possibly makes it as a great as all the songs and stories and poems. ~ Dan Skinner,
673:Conscious dimly of births unfinished hid in our being
Rest we cannot; a world cries in us for space and for fullness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
674:Don't write poems to make girls like you, because it will not make them like you but it will give them something to quote back at you later in life. ~ Nick Earls,
675:Earth cannot long resist the man whom Heaven has chosen;
Gods with him walk; his chariot is led; his arm is assisted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
676:Ever word collector sure know that feeling, whether you've been catching songs or poems or stories. You've been caught in the magic." -Florentine ~ Natalie Lloyd,
677:I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems. ~ Denise Duhamel,
678:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get—and never would get. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz,
679:Power is divine; divinest of all is power over mortals.
Power then the conqueror seeks and power the imperial nation, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
680:the best poems it seems to me are written out of an ultimate need. and once the poem is written, the only need after that is to write another. ~ Charles Bukowski,
681:The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot. ~ W H Auden,
682:The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man. ~ Linton Kwesi Johnson,
683:The music is notated first, the text follows. I might have to wait until the right kind of text or form arises. I often see the poems as “scores.” ~ Anne Waldman,
684:What we call sin,
    Is but man’s leavings as from deep within
The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,
685:For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems. ~ Kate DiCamillo,
686:I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems. ~ Pattiann Rogers,
687:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz,
688:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz,
689:It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems. ~ Anne Ursu,
690:Leave to the night its phantoms, leave to the future its curtain!
Only today Heaven gave to mortal man for his labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
691:Life and treasure and fame to cast on the wings of a moment,
Fiercer joy than this the gods have not given to mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
692:Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning. ~ Madeleine L Engle,
693:Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
694:The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill;
I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Man,
695:AND even if you eat my poems while they're still freshYou still have to bring forward many images yourself.These poems are not just...old sayings ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,
696:For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ~ Mary Oliver,
697:He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. ~ Virginia Woolf,
698:He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
699:I feel especially drawn to them. He is a writer. He writes, with those hands. They are little gods, aren’t they? They create things, words, poems. ~ Saffron A Kent,
700:In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself. ~ Simon Armitage,
701:I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them. ~ Helen Vendler,
702:He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author. ~ Andre Makine,
703:Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost. ~ Jamie Wyeth,
704:The poems
were cool.

The best ones were
like bombs,
and when all the right words

came together
it was like an explosion. ~ Kwame Alexander,
705:Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, God,
706:All the poems have wolves in them. All but one. The most beautiful one of all. She dances in a ring of fire and throws off the challenge with a shrug. ~ Jim Morrison,
707:A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address. ~ Matthea Harvey,
708:...but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. ~ Azar Nafisi,
709:I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. ~ Gilda Radner,
710:Poems are not for explaining," she said, her tone as bored and faintly scornful as his. "They are for pretty girls to read aloud. Everyone knows that. ~ Emily Horner,
711:There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. ~ Neil Gaiman,
712:Thought could not think in him, flesh could not quiver;
    The feet of Time could not adventure here ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Yogi on the Whirlpool,
713:Well, hello, darling with the ocean eyes,
How many secrets keep us apart?
A sea of poems, a field of sighs,
Can I cross and return to the start? ~ Amy Zhang,
714:All things are by Time and the Will eternal that moves us,
And for each birth its hour is set in the night or the dawning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
715:As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store. ~ William H Gass,
716:I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens' poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism. ~ Cate Marvin,
717:I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. ~ Gilda Radner,
718:Man over woman, woman o’er man, over lover and foeman
Wrestling we strive to expand in our souls, to be wide, to be happy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
719:Something watches behind, Spirit or Self or Soul,
Viewing Space and its toil, waiting the end of Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,
720:The vault of heaven
Is not a true similitude for man
Whose space outgyres thought’s last horizon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
721:World-rhythms
Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight
World after world bursts on the awakened sight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Other Earths,
722:Even as death shall gather us all for memory’s clusters,
All in their day who were great or were little, heroes or cowards. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
723:Fine.” Desjani sighed. “Admiral, I recommend we get our intelligence officer up here to see if he can craft lovely poems for the singing spider wolves. ~ Jack Campbell,
724:I am interested in the movement of my own thoughts and in trying make the poems feel more accurate to experience, including the experience of thinking. ~ Rachel Zucker,
725:Led or misled we are mortals and walk by a light that is given;
Most they err who deem themselves most from error excluded. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
726:Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published. ~ Patrick Kavanagh,
727:Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany
Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
728:Men live like stars that see each other in heaven,
But one knows not the pleasure and the grief
The others feel ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
729:The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure. ~ Denise Duhamel,
730:This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. ~ Tracy K Smith,
731:And if you knew from what scraps
Poems are born — without shame
Like yellow dandelions by a wormy fence,
Like wild spinach or the common burr. ~ Anna Akhmatova,
732:Easily nations bow to a yoke when their virtue relaxes;
Hard is the breaking fetters once worn, for the virtue has perished. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
733:Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,
Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
734:Floribert could neither sing nor recite these poems because they were without words, but he dreamed and felt them sometimes, especially in the evenings. ~ Hermann Hesse,
735:I'm always talking about how the poems I am most obsessed with are like people: complex and unknowable and with a huge capacity for many different emotions. ~ Ada Limon,
736:In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary. ~ James Arthur,
737:My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific. ~ Diane Wakoski,
738:Not of the fire am I terrified, not of the sword and its slaying;
Vileness of men appals me, baseness I fear and its voices. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
739:That’s why Lizard cooked.  And why her poems never got written down.  Food disappeared—and then there was nothing around to remind her she was brilliant. ~ Debora Geary,
740:And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet." ~ Edward Hirsch,
741:I ask you to come through and show me where you're pouring out the blood of your life. ~ Carl Sandburg, in "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter" in Chicago Poems (1916), p. 63,
742:I can already feel some things slipping through my fingers like sand and water, like artifacts and poems, like everything you want to hold on to and can’t. ~ Ally Condie,
743:I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times. ~ Gary Snyder,
744:I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker. ~ David Antin,
745:Just as a great poet can use one scene to bring another new, unknown vista into view. It should be obvious, but the best metaphors make the best poems. ~ Haruki Murakami,
746:My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego. ~ Joseph Brodsky,
747:Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away ~ Norman Mailer,
748:Swan, by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page. ~ Jessye Norman,
749:This observe, thy task in thy destiny noble or fallen;
Time and result are the gods’; with these things be not thou troubled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
750:While thou livest, perfectly fulfil
Thy part, conceive
Earth as thy stage, thyself the actor strong,
The drama His. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
751:For grief and pain
Are errors of the clouded soul; behind
They do not stain
The living spirit who to these is blind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
752:I mean you ask me
not to fall in love with you
and then you go write poems
with your tongue
and draw constellations
in my freckles. ~ Clementine von Radics,
753:I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine ~ Donald Hall,
754:It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa,
755:Non-Violence
Deem nothing vain: through many veils
This Spirit gleams.
The dreams of God are truths and He prevails. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
756:Occult masters of destiny,
They who sit in the Secrecy
And watch unmoved ever
Unto the end of all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Winged with Dangerous Deity,
757:Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past ~ G K Chesterton,
758:Poems build our capacity for imaginative thinking, create a tolerance for ambiguity, and foster an appreciation for the role of the unknown in human life. ~ Tony Hoagland,
759:The language is spare and under control and has a genuine immediacy...The poems never preach but are lined out with a cool and therefore devastating effect ~ Vern Rutsala,
760:These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't. ~ Dylan Thomas,
761:Great men and death
Such puissance great well-poisèd natures prove
To mould to their own likeness all they love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,
762:In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even
Pain is the ransom we pay for the smallest foretaste of heaven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
763:Light, brooding Light! each smitten passionate cell
In a mute blaze of ecstasy preserves
A living sense of the Imperishable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,
764:She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling. ~ Ally Condie,
765:All those years and their moments—
Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,
Poems tried out on friends,
Will be one more archive,
One more shaky text. ~ Gary Snyder,
766:Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. ~ Mary Oliver,
767:Always a few will be left whom the threatenings of Fate cannot conquer,
Always souls are born whose courage waits not on fortune ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
768:Hear its cry when God’s moment changing our fate comes visored
Silently into our lives and the spirit too knows, for it watches. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
769:There's so much rage in the world now and I'm finding poems to be the place where I want to stay. I rage and rage and then write a poem and return to breathing. ~ Ada Limon,
770:These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't. ~ Dylan Thomas,
771:All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story. ~ James MacDonald,
772:Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. ~ Harold Bloom,
773:Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton,
774:I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem. ~ Matthea Harvey,
775:Not as the ways of other mortals are theirs who are guided,
They whose eyes are the gods and they walk by a light that is secret. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
776:We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand. ~ Troy Hicks,
777:Hypocrisy, false labels, can create slogans but no poems; propaganda but not life: there are no roots, there are no realities to nurture creative work. ~ Pablo Antonio Cuadra,
778:If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. ~ Hakim Bey,
779:I just can't help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems . . . ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
780:Life with her wine-cup of longing under the purple of her tenture,
Death as her gate of escape and rebirth and renewal of venture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
781:Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing. ~ Stephen Dobyns,
782:Paula Bonhoeffer had memorized an impressive repertoire of poems, hymns, and folk songs, which she taught her children, who remembered them into their old age. ~ Eric Metaxas,
783:Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler. ~ Martin Amis,
784:Souls that are true to themselves are immortal; the soulless for ever
Lingers helpless in Hades a shade among shades disappointed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
785:Atom and molecule in their unseen plan
Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses,
Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
786:One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant. ~ Daniel Handler,
787:One sole oracle helps, still armoured in courage and prudence
Patient and heedful to toil at the work that is near in the daylight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
788:Only of one thing
Man can be sure, the will in his heart and his strength in his purpose:
This too is Fate and this too the gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
789:Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose. ~ Pattiann Rogers,
790:She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement. ~ Jane Rule,
791:The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember. ~ David Antin,
792:To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it ~ Donald Hall,
793:Destiny’s lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining,
Draws us through tangles of failure and victory’s inextricable twining. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
794:Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven’s that are bare and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to Infinity flying. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
795:I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun,
796:Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God,
Towards whom we drove
In spite of weakness, evil, grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
797:Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton,
798:On the safe land
To linger is to lose what God has planned
    For man’s wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To the Sea,
799:poetry it takes a lot of desperation dissatisfaction and disillusion to write a few good poems. it’s not for everybody either to write it or even to read it. ~ Charles Bukowski,
800:Yet was the battle decreed for the means supreme of the mortal
Placed in a world where all things strive from the worm to the Titan. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
801:Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay. ~ Janet Fitch,
802:And this the reason of his high unease,
    Because he came from the infinities
To build immortally with mortal things; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,
803:Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue. ~ Cate Marvin,
804:He gives me that hint of a half smile tempered with those smoky eyes, a look that’s probably stolen virginities, broken hearts, and inspired a few bad poems. ~ Roxanne St Claire,
805:I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. ~ Philip Larkin,
806:It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write. ~ Philip Larkin,
807:I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic. ~ Thom Gunn,
808:Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle,
Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
809:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight,
    Thy grasp. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,
810:The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),
811:There's a Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. He was a very crotchety, strange man, but his poems are wonderful. He was nominated for the Nobel in the 1990s but never won. ~ Stephen Dobyns,
812:Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves. ~ George Oppen,
813:We must pass through the aeons; Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
814:You can't just be reactive to the things going on in your life. You have to imagine, and you have to plunder other people's work, books, poems, ideas, observations. ~ David Gray,
815:Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world. ~ Norman Maclean,
816:Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems. ~ Alex Lemon,
817:Books become my refuge. Reading keeps me hopeful. I fall in love with small poems, the shorter the better- haiku from Japan, and tiny rhymes by Emily Dickinson. ~ Margarita Engle,
818:Charmed men applaud the skilful purpose, the dexterous speaker;
This they forget that a Force decides, not the wiles of the statesman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
819:Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly . ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
820:don't start talkin about books or quotin poems at them. these is good folks but they ain't real crazy about readin books. just do what i do and you'll be all right. ~ William Gay,
821:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Rumi,
822:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Rumi,
823:I said, “Lee, you have the soul of a poet.” He said, “I am a poet—I’ve written over a hundred poems,” which, I think, is about the least poetic thing I’ve ever heard. ~ Anonymous,
824:Talk of poems and prayers and promises, and things that we believe in. How sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care, how long it's been since yesterday. ~ John Denver,
825:The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems. ~ Thomas B Macaulay,
826:When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems. ~ James Franco,
827:and i don't think you should lie to me with any nature poems
because you know you don't think sand is beautiful
unless you are in a good mood, which you never are ~ Tao Lin,
828:Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping,
Of February, in sobs and ink,
Write poems, while the slush in thunder
Is burning in the black of spring. ~ Boris Pasternak,
829:Dear are the halls of our childhood, dear are the fields of our fathers,
Yet to the soul that is free no spot on the earth is an exile. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
830:I can't quite see the point of poems like "Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest." I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not. ~ Andre Naffis Sahely,
831:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that light becomes this art. ~ Rumi,
832:Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck. ~ Kim Addonizio,
833:This is the nature of earth that to blows she responds and by scourgings
Travails excited; pain is the bed of her blossoms of pleasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
834:Wystan loved medical talk, and he had a soft spot for physicians. (In his book Epistle to a Godson, there are four poems dedicated to doctors, including one to me.) ~ Oliver Sacks,
835:Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything. ~ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor,
836:Hard is the way to the Eternal for the mind-born will of the mortal
Bound by the body and life to the gait of the house-burdened turtle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
837:Hid in our hearts is his glory; the Spirit works in our members.
Silence is he, with our voices he speaks, in our thoughts he remembers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
838:One is there only, apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning,—
He who has sent through his soul’s wide spaces the universe spinning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
839:One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
840:Poems are language turned into art; sound and sense matter; they can be as long or longer than The Odyssey or as short or shorter than a haiku. Not very helpful. ~ Campbell McGrath,
841:Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning. ~ Ernest Cline,
842:What is Friendship, Definition of Friend, True Friendship - All about the meaning of true friends, what friendship means, meaning of friendship bracelets, poems, ring ~ Mark Vernon,
843:Blood and grief are the ransom of men for the joys of their transience,
For we are mortals bound in our strength and beset in our labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
844:I wanted his hands at my back and his lips speaking poems on mine and our journey to each other to be completed, the miles between us consumed and all distance closed. ~ Ally Condie,
845:Strange, remote and splendid
Childhood’s fancy pure
Thrills to thoughts we cannot fathom,
Quick felicities obscure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Child’s Imagination,
846:Thomas make it easy to cave to temptation with his golden - blond hair, muscle from head to toe and sexy brooding expression a few girls have written about in poems. ~ Katie McGarry,
847:He was young, no older than fifteen, pale and dark-haired, wearing jeans and a soft white T-shirt that had SHAKESPEARE HATES YOUR EMO POEMS written across the chest. ~ Marjorie M Liu,
848:I am that Madan who inform the stars
With lustre and on life’s wide canvas fill
Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
849:I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~ Donald Hallfrom an interview in Narrative magazine ~ Donald Hall,
850:Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a ~ Joseph Campbell,
851:None has been able to hold all the gods in his bosom unstaggered,
All have grown drunken with force and have gone down to Hell and to Ate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
852:The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you. ~ Seamus Heaney,
853:while I walk on the moon keeps pace beside me: friend in the water [1852.jpg] -- from Japanese Death Poems, Translated by Yoel Hoffman

~ Masahide, Masahides Death Poem
,
854:Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,
855:As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. ~ Mary Oliver,
856:His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity. His books are about unpleasant people leading lives of surpassing dullness. ~ Agatha Christie,
857:I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last. ~ Leslie Fiedler,
858:Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow
If by her heart’s toil a loan-light of joy from the heavens she can borrow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
859:Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems. ~ Pattiann Rogers,
860:There our sun cannot shine and our moon has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire of these spaces is suffered. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
861:[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry. ~ Nikki Giovanni,
862:Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to. ~ John Berger,
863:Dread not the ruin, fear not the storm-blast, yield not, O Trojans.
Zeus shall rebuild. Death ends not our days, the fire shall not triumph. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
864:However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition. ~ Helen Dunmore,
865:I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems. ~ Damien Hirst,
866:It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. ~ Alain de Botton,
867:I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. ~ Sylvia Plath,
868:My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,    My body is God’s happy living tool,        My spirit a vast sun of deathless light. (Collected poems ~ Transformation )#SriAurobindo,
869:Not on the tramp of the multitudes, not on the cry of the legions
Founds the strong man his strength but the god that he carries within him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
870:One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted. ~ Stanley Kunitz,
871:There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do. ~ Jack Prelutsky,
872:Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, ~ Walt Whitman,
873:Gods change not their strength, but are of old
And as of old, and man, though less than these,
May yet proceed to greater, self-evolved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
874:He shrugged. “Whatever does it mean? We write poems about it all day and sing songs about it all night but if there is such a thing in real life I’m damned if I know. ~ Philippa Gregory,
875:I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry. ~ Billy Collins,
876:It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing. ~ e e cummings,
877:Knowing all vain, yet we strive; for our nature seizing us always
Drives like the flock that is herded and urged towards shambles or pasture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
878:Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not,
Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
879:What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation. ~ Judith Butler,
880:Easy is the love that lasts
Only with favours in the shopman heart!
Who, smitten, takes and gives the kiss, he loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
881:For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating. ~ Robert Pinsky,
882:I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems. ~ Denise Duhamel,
883:I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively. ~ Dan Chiasson,
884:The human eye is a wonderful device,” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice. ~ Richard K Morgan,
885:The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands. ~ Beth Kephart,
886:This grey hour was born
For the ascetic in his silent cave
And for the dying man whose heart released
Loosens its vibrant strings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,
887:But the point is this: stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems. And they don’t have to stick to genre. Poems can learn from plays, songs from novels. ~ Thomas C Foster,
888:I felt very bad in Washington. . . I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems. ~ Langston Hughes,
889:I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home. ~ Rigoberto Gonzalez,
890:It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils. ~ Honore de Balzac,
891:Man, by experience of passion purged,
His myriad faculty perfecting, widens
His nature as it rises till it grows
With God conterminous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,
892:Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have - A something overtakes the Mind. ~ Emily Dickinson,
893:Always man’s Fate hangs poised on the flitting breath of a moment;
Called by some word, by some gesture it leaps, then ‘tis graven, ‘tis granite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
894:A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned. ~ Yasunari Kawabata,
895:Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? ~ Walt Whitman,
896:I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said. ~ Alberto Manguel,
897:One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility. I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is. ~ Adrian Matejka,
898:People spend their whole lives looking for love. Poems and songs and entire novels are written about it. But how can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins? ~ Nicola Yoon,
899:[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.

(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite) ~ Pierre Reverdy,
900:There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that. ~ William Carlos Williams,
901:We, too, by the Eternal Might are led
To whatsoever goal He wills.
Our helm He grasps, our generous sail outspread
His strong breath fills. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
902:What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters. ~ Matthea Harvey,
903:When the end comes, dark and hungry I'll be alone, love When the end comes, black and starving I'll say good-bye, love.-from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
904:And I never wanted to tell anyone but the poems   because I was the one with the pink garter belt and the thigh-high stockings. And I was the one with the little black dress. ~ Trista Mateer,
905:Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,
906:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,
907:I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured. ~ Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont,
908:The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
909:The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs. ~ Henry Rollins,
910:Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems ~ Walt Whitman,
911:He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour,
912:Sin exalted
Seizes secure on the thrones of the world for her glorious portion,
Down to the bottomless pit the good man is thrust in his virtue. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
913:Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds. ~ Dorianne Laux,
914:And all man’s ghastly company of fears
Are born of folly that believes this span
Of brittle life can limit immortal man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To Weep because a Glorious Sun,
915:As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing. ~ Colum McCann,
916:I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations. ~ Nicole Krauss,
917:In poems or in speeches I say the word or two that has got to be said, adhere to the body, step with the countless common footsteps, and remind every man and woman of something. ~ Walt Whitman,
918:I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry. ~ Randall Jarrell,
919:I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think. ~ Paul Beatty,
920:Later, we'll look up what was recorded in our history about yours in faraway lands.

Then we'll ask ourselves, "Was Andalusia here or there? On earth, or only in poems? ~ Mahmoud Darwish,
921:May Moorland weavers boast Pindaric skill, And tailors' lays be longer than their bill! While punctual beaux reward the grateful notes, And pay for poems--when they pay for coats. ~ Lord Byron,
922:So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the book have longer lines. ~ Matthew Zapruder,
923:The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour,
924:A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Tree,
925:I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures. ~ Denise Duhamel,
926:It was interesting, not stupid or silly or sappy or overly intellectual—not any of those things that I thought poetry was. Some poems were easier than others. Some were inscrutable. ~ Anonymous,
927:My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
    My body is God’s happy living tool,
        My spirit a vast sun of deathless light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,
928:Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. ~ Audre Lorde,
929:Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. ~ Theodor W Adorno,
930:Is not the world his disguise? when that cloak is tossed back from his shoulders,
Beauty looks out like a sun on the hearts of the ravished beholders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
931:It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance. ~ Honore de Balzac,
932:Sometimes I Do In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that light becomes this art. ~ Rumi,
933:Don'T Look For My Life In These Poems
Poems have order, sanity
aesthetic distance from debris.
All I've learnt from pain
I always knew,
but could not do.
~ Eunice de Souza,
934:His seven so-called Phallic Poems are among the best non-love verses since the brave days of Marvell and the Metaphysicals; they openly announce that fucking is its own justification. ~ Anonymous,
935:I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery. ~ Matthea Harvey,
936:If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool. ~ Matthea Harvey,
937:I know
you and I
are not about poems or
other sentimental bullshit
but I have to tell you
even the way
you drink your coffee
knocks me the fuck out. ~ Clementine von Radics,
938:My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file. ~ Anna Journey,
939:The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing ~ Robert Bly,
940:Vain, they have said, is the anguish of man and his labour diurnal,
Vainly his caravans cross through the desert of Time to the Eternal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,
941:In some faint dawn,
In some dim eve,
    Like a gesture of Light,
    Like a dream of delight
Thou com’st nearer and nearer to me. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In Some Faint Dawn,
942:I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi. ~ John Lennon,
943:Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs. ~ James Arthur,
944:Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
945:Thick and persistent the night confronts all his luminous longings;
Dire death’s sickle mows like a harvest his hosts and his throngings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,
946:Wilt thou not perfect this rather that sprang too from Wisdom and Power?
Taking the earthly rose canst thou image not Heaven in a flower? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
947:I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion. ~ Diane Wakoski,
948:I'm going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I'm going to write the songs that people can't write for themselves. ~ Stevie Nicks,
949:Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art... ~ Hannah Arendt,
950:Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own. ~ James W Sire,
951:I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on." ~ Tom Courtenay,
952:No matter how many romantic poems you recite, no matter how many glorious tales of love you read, how can you really understand the condition if you've never found yourself in it? ~ Sherry D Ficklin,
953:Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ~ Mary Oliver,
954:What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks,
955:I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry. ~ Matthea Harvey,
956:Life is equal parts strange and beautiful and horrible, and we're tossed into it without a map or an instruction guide. Poems and stories have a way of helping us make sense of things. ~ Chuck Wendig,
957:Life is equal parts strange and beautiful and horrible, and we’re tossed into it without a map or an instruction guide. Poems and stories have a way of helping us make sense of things. ~ Chuck Wendig,
958:My mind is awake in stirless trance,
Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;
Dispelled is the senses’ flicker-dance,
Mute the body aureate with light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Trance,
959:Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form—spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved ~ George MacDonald,
960:When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly. ~ James Arthur,
961:Around me was a formless solitude:
All had become one strange Unnameable,
An unborn sole Reality world-nude,
Topless and fathomless, for ever still. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,
962:Confident of His grace, expect His will;
Let Him lead; though hidden be the bourne,
See Him in all that happens; that fulfil
For which thou wert born. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
963:fools! whose pride
Absurd the gods permit a little space
To please their souls with laughter, then replace
In the loud limbo of futilities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,
964:like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like.” “That’s what life is like?” I was trying to get his meaning. “Yeah. It rhymes, but not in the way you expect. ~ John Green,
965:One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer,.... The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better ~ Isaac Asimov,
966:Poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say. ~ Plato,
967:Rejoice and fear not for the waves that swell,
The storms that thunder, winds that sweep;
Always our Captain holds the rudder well,
He does not sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,
968:Time is a strong convention; future and present
Were living in the past;
They are one image that our wills complaisant
Into three schemes have cast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,
969:Don't go on thinking poetry's just for sissies. There's mushy love poems, for sure, but there's also funny ones, lots about nature, war even. Whole point of it-they make ya feel something ~ Delia Owens,
970:I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems. ~ Heinrich Heine,
971:Lo, all these peoples and who was it fashioned them? Who is unwilling
Still to have done with it? laughs beyond pain and saves in the killing? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
972:Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature
And have a dateless birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,
They were not made on earth, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,
973:Summer is dead and rich repose
And springtide and the rose,
And woods and all sweet things make moan;
The weeping earth is turned to stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
974:Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~ Dylan Thomas,
975:I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things. ~ Edmund White,
976:Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems. ~ Margaret Atwood,
977:Man worships the ungrasped. His vagrant thought
Still busy with the illimitable void
Lives all the time by little things upbuoyed
Which he contemns ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Euphrosyne,
978:Noble be in peace, invincible, brave in the battle,
Stern and calm to thy foe, to the suppliant merciful. Mortal
Favour and wrath as thou walkst heed never ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
979:I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words. ~ Matt Haig,
980:I have laboured and suffered in Matter’s night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour,
981:I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy. ~ Michael Longley,
982:Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too. ~ Matthew Zapruder,
983:Stars are important," I say, laughing.

"Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it's our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two. ~ Nicola Yoon,
984:Still, still we can hear them
Now, if we listen long in our souls, the bygone voices.
Earth in her fibres remembers, the breezes are stored with our echoes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
985:We recognize that we cannot survive on meditation, poems and sunsets. We are restless. We have an irresistible urge to dip our hands into the stuff of the earth and do something with it. ~ Samuel Florman,
986:You needn't tell a bird it's a bird. Or remind a fish of its purpose. It's only us who lose our way. We have names because we must. - from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
987:They're not. That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets. ~ J D Salinger,
988:I like when a poem ends on its "receipts," meaning it gives me something tactile or tangible to dwell on as I exit the reading experience. So I strive to end my own poems that way as well. ~ Allison Joseph,
989:I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. ~ Dylan Thomas,
990:On the white summit of eternity
    A single Soul of bare infinities,
    Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace
His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Shiva,
991:There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me. ~ Joan Larkin,
992:Therefore is the woman’s part
Nearest divine, who to one motion keeps
And like the fixed immortal planets’ round
Is constant to herself in him she loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Uloupie,
993:With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making. ~ Douglas Florian,
994:You know, Emily Dickinson is here too. All she does is write poems about life all the time. The irony! She keeps asking me to read them. I refuse, of course. The days are long enough as it is. ~ John Boyne,
995: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. ~ W H Auden,
996:I like to hope that Rumi's poems, even in translation, carry the essence of the transforming friendship of Rumi and Shams, that the sun can reappear, whole and radiant in any one of us at any moment. ~ Rumi,
997:Maybe lurking in my unconscious was the idea that when someone's collected poems are published it means that the poet is dead. I found myself looking at my work as if I were at my own funeral. ~ Ron Padgett,
998:Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily l ~ Audre Lorde,
999: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?" ~ Sam Hamill,
1000:Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event. ~ Denise Duhamel,
1001:As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit it, or tell it when we meet, but don’t expect me to get excited by anything anymore. ~ Jack Kerouac,
1002:Form in its heart of silence recondite
    Hides the significance of His mystery,
    Form is the wonder-house of eternity,
A cavern of the deathless Eremite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,
1003:In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article. ~ Caroline Kennedy,
1004:It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. ~ John Drinkwater,
1005:I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors. ~ Carl Sandburg,
1006:Love poems, discovered in Egyptian tombs, strongly hint that it was the Egyptian women who did the courting, oftimes wooing the male by plying him with intoxicants to weaken his protestations. ~ Merlin Stone,
1007:The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself. ~ Paul Auster,
1008:When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself. ~ Tom Robbins,
1009:You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
1010:Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
1011:I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order. ~ Anthony Hecht,
1012:Yama, the strong pure Hades sad and subtle,
Dharma, who keeps the laws of old untouched,
Critanta, who ends all things and at last
Himself shall end. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,
1013:Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years. ~ Lady Gregory,
1014:Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. ~ Erica Jong,
1015:Temple-ground
Man, shun the impulses dire that spring armed from thy nature’s abysms!
Dread the dusk rose of the gods, flee the honey that tempts from its petals! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1016:There is a beautiful thing inside you
that is thousands of years old.

Too old to be captured in poems.
Too old to be loved by everyone
But loved so very deeply
by a chosen few. ~ Nikita Gill,
1017:We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth. ~ Timothy Morton,
1018:If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice. ~ Jorie Graham,
1019:I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet. I just wrote urgently - naïvely, I suppose, looking back. ~ Denise Duhamel,
1020:In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words. ~ Ted Hughes,
1021:I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it. ~ Pat Conroy,
1022:Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed. ~ Mary Oliver,
1023:Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am. ~ Charles Bukowski,
1024:We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stores and poems. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,
1025:A king of greatness and a slave of love,
Host of the stars and guest in Nature’s inn,
A high spectator spirit throned above,
A pawn of passion in the game divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,
1026:Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. ~ Audre Lorde,
1027:The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers. ~ Wendy Cope,
1028:Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world? ~ Lauren Groff,
1029:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet.
Workings immortal obscurely struggling, hints of a godhead
Labour to form in this clay a divinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1030:I don't aspire, but I would be very happy if one of my poems suddenly offered someone a shady rest stop, a breather in our interminable march under the murderous, scorching heat of the superfluous. ~ Kiki Dimoula,
1031:In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures. ~ Peter Porter,
1032:I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood. ~ Mariah Carey,
1033:So writing about love or having it infuse the poems that I'm writing has never been something I've set myself to do, except when I write a poem for my wife, for an occasion, such as our anniversary. ~ Ron Padgett,
1034:Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. ~ Nikki Giovanni,
1035:You needn't tell a bird it's a bird
Or remind a fish of its purpose
It's only us who lose our way
We have names because we must.
– from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
1036:All is not finished in the unseen decree;
A Mind beyond our mind demands our ken,
A life of unimagined harmony
Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
1037:Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson. ~ Ann Beattie,
1038:He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.
Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,
I stand upon its boundaries and stare
Into the frontiers of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,
1039:I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now. ~ Maya Angelou,
1040:Let the little troubled life-god within
Cast his veils from the still soul,
His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,
His clamour and glamour and thole and dole ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,
1041:Human bodies are words, myriads of words, (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.) ~ Walt Whitman,
1042:I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind. ~ Lucie Brock Broido,
1043:Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets. ~ Diane Wakoski,
1044:Wise are the gods in their silence,
Wise when they speak; but their speech is other than ours and their wisdom
Hard for a mortal mind to hold and not madden or wander. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1045:Blue eyes. No, not just blue, blue like glacial waters, like romantic poems, like heavens and moonstones. Cornflower blue. And-
Blue like romantic poems? What the everliving fuck? (Austin) ~ Dani Alexander,
1046:I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa,
1047:I shall not die.
    Although this body, when the spirit tires
    Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires,
My house consumes, not I. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Triumph-Song of Trishuncou,
1048:Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object? ~ Franz Grillparzer,
1049:I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems. ~ Mary Ann Hoberman,
1050:I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem. ~ Ray Bradbury,
1051:I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa,
1052:The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words. ~ Paul Engle,
1053:We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats. ~ Henry Louis Gates,
1054:Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends. ~ Barbara Pym,
1055:The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us. ~ Andr Breton,
1056:Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them. ~ Neil Gaiman,
1057: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. ~ W H Auden,
1058:Fate severe like a mother
Teaches our wills by disaster and strikes down the props that would weaken,
Fate and the Thought on high that is wiser than yearnings of mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1059:If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world. ~ Michael Jackson,
1060:I have broken the limits of embodied mind
And am no more the figure of a soul.
The burning galaxies are in me outlined;
The universe is my stupendous whole. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,
1061:I have escaped and the small self is dead;
I am immortal, alone, ineffable;
I have gone out from the universe I made,
And have grown nameless and immeasurable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,
1062:I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,
I have offered up my will to be Thy will:
Let nothing of myself be left behind
In our union mystic and unutterable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
1063:I write you poems because God spoke the universe into existence, so don’t ever let me hear you say that words are just words. that words don’t leave a mark, make a change, create where once was nothing. ~ Upile Chisala,
1064:lift the veil that obscures the heart and there you will find what you are looking for [2248.jpg] -- from Beloved May I Enter: Kabir dohas and other poems, Translated by Sushil Rao

~ Kabir, lift the veil
,
1065:My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying, learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. It's a great job.
Naturally I'm starving to death ~ Lew Welch,
1066:The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us. ~ Andre Breton,
1067:'A Literary Method'
His poems Riley says that he indites
Upon an empty stomach. Heavenly Powers,
Feed him throat-full: for what the beggar writes
Upon his empty stomach empties ours!
~ Ambrose Bierce,
1068:Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more? ~ Lynn Freed,
1069:EpitaphMoulded of twilight and the vesper starMidnight in her with noon made quiet war; –Moulded twixt life and death, Love came between;Then the night fell; twilight faded, the star had been. ~ Sri AurobindoShort Poems,
1070:I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in. ~ George Lucas,
1071:In the republic of poetry, poets rent a helicopter to bombard the national palace with poems on bookmarks, and everyone in the courtyard rushes to grab a poem fluttering from the sky, blinded by weeping. ~ Mart n Espada,
1072:I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation. ~ Sam Abell,
1073:I write poems for children to help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world and to look at their lives from the inside out. I write humorous poems to tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. ~ Charles Ghigna,
1074:People love their fathers. Their sisters. People love dogs or songs or poems. If I've got to be the champion of something, make it something that doesn't change what it means every time someone says it. ~ Daniel Abraham,
1075:Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. ~ Ian McEwan,
1076:We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches. ~ Anna Akhmatova,
1077:Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought. ~ James Arthur,
1078:And it didn’t matter how many songs or poems had already been written about them, because whenever he thought about the girl, the stars shone brighter. As if she were the one keeping them illuminated. ~ Stephanie Perkins,
1079:Fools or hypocrites! Meanest falsehood is this among mortals,
Veils of purity weaving, names misplacing ideal
When our desires we disguise and paint the lusts of our nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1080:He is not anything, yet all is He;
He is not all but far exceeds that scope.
Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:
Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,
1081:I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others. ~ Matthea Harvey,
1082:The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
1083:There are Brahmins to-day who have committed to memory, and who can repeat at will, the entire collection of religious poems known as the Mahabarata, consisting of over 300,000 slokas or verses. ~ William Walker Atkinson,
1084:They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poets. ~ J D Salinger,
1085:Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
1086:And high Delight, a spirit infinite,
That is the fountain of this glorious world,
Delight that labours in its opposite,
Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,
1087:He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. ~ John Fowles,
1088:(I also occasionally write poems, after first explaining carefully to the audience and myself that I am not a poet and this is not actually a poem and no poetry was harmed in the making of this blog post.)  ~ T Kingfisher,
1089:If she only knew that all of his poems had been written to her and no one else, every single one, even the one to Night, even the one to the Spirit of the Swamp. But that was something she should never know. ~ Knut Hamsun,
1090:In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
1091:Sometimes you completely forget your own works, your own poems, and your own words, but others remember them line by line, word for word! That is the greatest present you can ever have for your works! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan,
1092:I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques. ~ David Lehman,
1093:It's a beautiful universe... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it. ~ Samuel R Delany,
1094:Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another. ~ Daisaku Ikeda,
1095:There are two beings in my single self.
A Godhead watches Nature from behind
At play in front with a brilliant surface elf,
A time-born creature with a human mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,
1096:The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard. ~ Barbara Pym,
1097:God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods... ~ Socrates,
1098:the writer liked machines and people who work with machines, he respected what they do, and he wrote poems showing that the lives of engineers and miners and pilots have their own excitement and romance. ~ Charles Sheffield,
1099:TO FOREIGN LANDS. I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted. ~ Walt Whitman,
1100:Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means -- and with absolute sincerity -- but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems. ~ A S Byatt,
1101:I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say. ~ Socrates,
1102:No sir, I’ll live to write dozens more poems to read aloud to you.” Mrs. Wiggins looked at him, and a big sob that was coming up in her throat, turned into a laugh, and she said: “That’s what I’m afraid of. ~ Walter R Brooks,
1103:Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder, that the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze, leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder ~ Bob Dylan,
1104:A life of intensities wide, immune
Floats behind the earth and her life-fret,
A magic of realms mastered by spell and rune,
Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,
1105:All is abolished but the mute Alone.
    The mind from thought released, the heart from grief
    Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,
1106:GIFT You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me ~ Leonard Cohen,
1107:It is Thy rapture flaming through my nerves
And all my cells and atoms thrill with Thee;
My body Thy vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Thy ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity,
1108:It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe. ~ Pearl S Buck,
1109:I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out. ~ Erica Jong,
1110:Nathan said, “Not a chance. I’ve heard him recite it in class. He knows dozens of Poe’s poems by heart. ‘The Raven,’ ‘Lenore,’ ‘The Lake,’ ‘To Annie’…dozens of them. Sometimes I think he fucking channels Poe. ~ Randall Silvis,
1111:One thing about being a children's poet or a versifier, is that there is a large market for your wares. These things really made the rounds. I would meet people and they'd quote my poems to me. It's great. ~ Mary Ann Hoberman,
1112:The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary. ~ Seamus Heaney,
1113:Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues. ~ Denise Duhamel,
1114:He must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
Until he meets upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil—or thunderstroke of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,
1115:Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
    Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
        One in a mighty and single vastness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,
1116:I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn. ~ James Arthur,
1117:If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall. ~ Morrissey,
1118:Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads. ~ Joseph Epstein,
1119:Psychographs
Says Gerald Massey: 'When I write, a band
Of souls of the departed guides my hand.'
How strange that poems cumbering our shelves,
Penned by immortal parts, have none themselves
~ Ambrose Bierce,
1120:Delle belle eruditissima, delle erudite bellissima. - Most learned of the fair, most fair of the learned. ~ Sannazarius, inscription to Cassandra Marchesia in an edition of the letter's poems. See Greswell, Memoirs of Politian.,
1121:I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
1122:Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd,
1123:Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written. ~ Ally Carter,
1124:Considering the number of ghastly love poems that had been written and which seemed fairly clearly a waste of everyone's time, Jonathan couldn't help but be surprised that coffee hadn't been thus immortalized. ~ James P Blaylock,
1125:It's fun to see someone grow as a writer, moving from their first workshopped poems to publishing their earliest poems to having a book accepted for publication. It's great to see poets with persistence succeed. ~ Allison Joseph,
1126:Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But ~ Garth Greenwell,
1127:My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do. ~ Anne Stevenson,
1128:Some huge somnambulist Intelligence
Devising without thought process and plan
Arrayed the burning stars’ magnificence,
The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,
1129:I housed within my heart the life of things,
All hearts athrob in the world I felt as mine;
I shared the joy that in creation sings
And drank its sorrow like a poignant wine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,
1130:I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs. ~ Ben Gibbard,
1131:Life and mind and their glory and debate
Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme,
    A sketch confused of a supernal plan,
        A preface to the epic of the Supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,
1132:now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The Voice that only Silence’ ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,
1133:There is a silence greater than any known
To earth’s dumb spirit, motionless in the soul
    That has become Eternity’s foothold,
        Touched by the infinitudes for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,
1134:I curated our love into poems
and all the pains became less
all the anger left, eventually
but, there is no denying
here on the tip of my soul
with scars still healing,
that once I loved a man. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo,
1135:My mind is hushed in wide and endless light,
My heart a solitude of delight and peace,
My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,
My body a point in white infinities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,
1136:Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
    A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
        Azure on azure, is mutely gazing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,
1137:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
1138:Who art thou in the heart comrade of man who sitst
August, watching his works, watching his joys and griefs,
Unmoved, careless of pain, careless of death and fate? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,
1139:A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,
A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,
A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,
1140:Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of the poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies--in holiness and mirth. ~ Mary Oliver,
1141:For poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." Mary Oliver (1935-2019). This quote from 'A Poetry Handbook' (1994) ~ Mary Oliver,
1142:It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan,
1143:One on another we prey and one by another are mighty.
This is the world and we have not made it; if it is evil,
Blame first the gods; but for us, we must live by its laws or we perish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1144:So you heroically undertook to endure the pains of faithlessness, just to be able to write good poems. But you didn´t realise then that when you lost that voice inside you, you´d end up all alone in an empty universe. ~ Orhan Pamuk,
1145:To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour... ~ William Blake (from "Auguries of Innocence"; via @PoetryFound) poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/au…,
1146:Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacrifice wasted ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1147:A creature of his own grey ignorance,
    A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath
    That wrestles, captive in a world of death,
To live some lame brief years. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,
1148:And in that cold metal aisle, alone, I wanted him. I wanted his hands at my back and his lips speaking poems on mine and our journey to each other to be completed, the miles between us consumed and all distance closed. ~ Ally Condie,
1149:Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of. ~ Robert Frost,
1150:His heart was now beating rapidly. He wanted to embrace her, cover her with kisses, caress her hair, touch her breast, stroke her thighs: he wanted to sing songs for her, dance dances for her, write poems for her. ~ Andrew M Greeley,
1151:I’d like to ask you a question, if I may.”
“What?”
“All these poems you’ve written and hidden—so many poems. Why?”
While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. “Because I could not stop. ~ Jeffrey Ford,
1152:Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you ~ e e cummings,
1153:I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness. ~ Theodore Roethke,
1154:I like poems that immediately claim my attention, instead of taking my attention for granted. At first read, I want to feel compelled to pick up the poem again; I want to be curious about its byways and secret corners. ~ James Arthur,
1155:The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry. ~ Campbell McGrath,
1156:Two genii in the dubious heart of man,
    Two great unhappy foes together bound
    Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground;
They strive for ever since the race began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,
1157:Alone in the dense bamboo, I sit playing my lute, humming along. Lost to this world, who will notice but the bright moon shining? from Bamboo Cottage: Poems and Translations, by Doug Westendorp

~ Wang Wei, Bamboo Cottage
,
1158:I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better. ~ Maurice Sendak,
1159:I saw my soul a traveller through Time;
From life to life the cosmic ways it trod,
Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime,
Evolving from the worm into the god. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
1160:Love and the need of mastery, joy and the longing for greatness
Rage like a fire unquenchable burning the world and creating,
Nor till humanity dies will they sink in the ashes of Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1161:Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative. ~ Marilyn Hacker,
1162:One, universal, ensphering creation,
Wheeling no more with inconscient Nature,
Feel thyself God-born, know thyself deathless.
Timeless return to thy immortal existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,
1163:Siken occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit, event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of prolonged animal struggle against acknowledgement. ~ Louise Gl ck,
1164:The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth,
The mindless stirrings of the plant and tree
Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,
1165:The greatness of a poet is not to be measured by the scale but by the intensity and the perfection of his works. Also by his vivacity. Williams is the author of the most vivid poems of modern American poetry. ~ William Carlos Williams,
1166:The novels, travel books and poems I read had a particular smell. The smell of cellars. An almost spicy smell, a mixture of dust and grease. Verdigris. Books today don't have a smell. They don't even smell of print. ~ Jean Claude Izzo,
1167:This mute stupendous Energy that whirls
The stars and nebulae in its long train,
Like a huge Serpent through my being curls
With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness Spirit,
1168:We are but sparks of that most perfect fire,
Waves of that sea:
From Him we come, to Him we go, desire
Eternally,
And so long as He wills, our separate birth
Is and shall be. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
1169:When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on". ~ Fred Rogers,
1170:All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice,
Music and thunder and the cry of birds,
Life’s babble of her sorrows and her joys,
Cadence of human speech and murmured words, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing,
1171:I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming,
1172:If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time? ~ Mary Ruefle,
1173:I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine. Time is my drama or my pageant dream.Now are my illumined cells joy's flaming scheme    And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine.(Collected Poems ~ Transformation)#SriAurobindo,
1174:In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
1175:That is our home and that the secret hope
Our hearts explore.
To bring those heavens down upon the earth
We all descend,
And fragments of it in the human birth
We can command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
1176:Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need. ~ Margaret Atwood,
1177:He who binds himself a joy Does the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise. [1991.jpg] -- from William Blake: The Complete Poems, by William Blake

~ William Blake, Eternity
,
1178:Now from his cycle sleepless and vast round the dance of the earth-globe
Gold Hyperion rose in the wake of the dawn like the eyeball
Flaming of God revealed by his uplifted luminous eyelid. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1179:The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1180:To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas.
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.”
― Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems ~ Dylan Thomas,
1181:When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen. ~ Michael Longley,
1182:Although consenting here to a mortal body,
He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not;
    For him the aeons are a playground,
        Life and its deeds are his splendid shadow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,
1183:... and it occured to me then and forever afterwards, that films, theatre books and poems were just a fraud. It's only music that doesn't deceive, it doesn't pretend to be anything else except what it is. Music. ~ Lars Saabye Christensen,
1184:How do your poems start out?” “They start as a lump in the throat,” she said. “Isn’t that normally just a cocktail olive lodged there?” Olivier asked. “Once,” Ruth admitted. “Wrote quite a good poem before I coughed it up. ~ Louise Penny,
1185:I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit’s seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind’s speed and the blazing star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,
1186:The Master who bends o’er His creatures,
Suffers their sins and their errors and guides them screening the guidance;
Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1187:All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
1188:As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet. ~ Matthea Harvey,
1189:I didn’t even know my face could do this. It’s like there were hidden zippers in my cheeks. Jesus.
This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now.
I get it, and I want more. ~ Laini Taylor,
1190:My life is the life of village and continent,
I am earth’s agony and her throbs of bliss;
I share all creatures’ sorrow and content
And feel the passage of every stab and kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,
1191:No danger can perturb my spirit’s calm:
My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;
Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,
Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune’s glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,
1192:Soul in the Ignorance, wake from its stupor.
Flake of the world-fire, spark of Divinity,
Lift up thy mind and thy heart into glory.
Sun in the darkness, recover thy lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,
1193:The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind. ~ Lactantius,
1194:Your clothing is not—how do we say?—not in harmony with the evening. Your shoes—oh, your shoes! I could write several depressing poems in the styling of Monsieur Camus about the existential problems posed by your shoes. ~ Christopher Bunn,
1195:A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem? ~ Clive James,
1196:I find it odd that, in real life people think I am funny but no one ever suspects that on the page! Personally, I think some of my work is a riot! I crack myself up, but I know that the poems seem so relentlessly dark. ~ Lucie Brock Broido,
1197:I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can't always tell they're failures until later... or I don't want to admit that they are. ~ Matthea Harvey,
1198:I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems. ~ Anna Journey,
1199:I wondered what this odd, well-spoken man was doing on Cairnholm, with his pleated slacks and half-baked poems, looking more like a bank manager than someone who lived on a windswept island with one phone and no paved roads. ~ Ransom Riggs,
1200:Love men, love God. Fear not to love, O King,
Fear not to enjoy;
For Death’s a passage, grief a fancied thing
Fools to annoy.
From self escape and find in love alone
A higher joy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
1201:Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew. ~ Louis Aragon,
1202:Greeks heard the poems read on stage while a group of dancers performed. Then a clever poet called Aeschylus came along and had a great idea. He put a second reader on stage. Now you had a ‘play’ –the first drama in the world. ~ Terry Deary,
1203:He's probably their battle poet, too." "You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?" "No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy....When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode. ~ Terry Pratchett,
1204:I find it hard to write poems in reaction to world/national events unless there's a way in that's so evident to me that I can't deny the urge to write about such events. It takes me a while to gather the evidence, you know? ~ Allison Joseph,
1205:Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
1206:The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time. ~ Robert Hass,
1207:There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive. ~ Edward Hirsch,
1208:Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition ~ A R Ammons,
1209:I'm trying to let a poem do what a poem does:
Make things simpler
We don't need poems to make things more complicated
We have each other for that
We need poems to remind ourselves of the things that really matter ~ Colleen Hoover,
1210:My soul’s wide self of living infinite Space
Outlines its body luminous and unborn
    Behind the earth-robe; under the earth-mask grows clear
        The mould of an imperishable face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Immortality,
1211:People have explored these questions ['Why am I here?', 'What is life about?'] in poems, not that they found their answers, but in reading [poems], I think, you find a certain beauty in the questioning, and that is then poetry. ~ Gwee Li Sui,
1212:Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need. ~ Helen Dunmore,
1213:The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit. ~ Plato,
1214:Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty. ~ Billy Collins,
1215:I know, O God, the day shall dawn at last
When man shall rise from playing with the mud
And taking in his hands the sun and stars
Remould appearance, law and process old. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
1216:Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation. ~ Ben Lerner,
1217:She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. ~ Marcel Proust,
1218:The prompt didn’t help me much, since all poems were difficult for me to write. They were like mirrors you held up to a black hole, or surrealist paintings. I liked things that made sense. Stories. Cause and effect. After ~ Brittany Cavallaro,
1219:Two are the ends of existence, two are the dreams of the Mother:
Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other,—
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
1220:I say I think my poems now are finer than anything I've ever done; I only hope that is the judgement of a ruined mind, with critical faculties shocked and fragmented on grief; because if they are great ... they cost too much! ~ Samuel R Delany,
1221:I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to. ~ Maya Angelou,
1222:Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,
Our strength a parody of the Immortal’s power,
Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal’s way
Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
1223:...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone. ~ Jean Genet,
1224:They glimpsed enough of each other to know they liked one another, but for us it is taboo to express such things. Instead he sent her poems she could not read. ‘I admired his mind,’ she says. ‘And me, her beauty,’ he laughs. ~ Malala Yousafzai,
1225:This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else's unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result. ~ Tracy K Smith,
1226:As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I cant help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so Im very excited when I notice that. ~ Kate Bernheimer,
1227:Being his workmanship doesn’t mean we are all poets. It means we are all poems, individual created works of a creative God. And this poetry comes out uniquely through us as we worship, think, love, pray, rest, work, and exist. ~ Emily P Freeman,
1228:I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
1229:Mention Homer across a table and a kind of anxiety comes into the face you are looking at, a sort of shame, perhaps a fear of seeming stupid and ignorant. Almost no one loves the poems he wrote or the phrases that recur in them. ~ Adam Nicolson,
1230:No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place. —ANNA AKHMATOVA, FROM POEMS OF AKHMATOVA, TRANSLATED BY STANLEY KUNITZ, WITH MAX HAYWARD ~ Kristin Hannah,
1231:The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time--- is he who shall create poems in stone. ~ Louis Sullivan,
1232:There is a joy behind suffering; pain digs our road to his pleasance.
All things have bliss for their secret; only our consciousness falters
Fearing to offer itself as a victim on ecstasy’s altars. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
1233:These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell... ~ Alice Sebold,
1234:Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation. ~ Sylvia Plath,
1235:Wear the robe of wisdom, brand Lalla's words on your heart, lose yourself in the soul's light, you too shall be free. [2579.jpg] -- from I Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, Translated by Ranjit Hoskote

~ Lalla, Wear the robe of wisdom
,
1236:Who shall foretell the event of a battle, the fall of a footstep?
Oracles, visions and prophecies voice but the dreams of the mortal,
And ‘tis our spirit within is the Pythoness tortured in Delphi. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1237:I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn’t fucking married. ~ A J Jacobs,
1238:I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. ~ Sylvia Plath,
1239:Over all earthly things the soul that is fearless is master,
Only on death he can reckon not whether it comes in the midnight
Treading the couch of Kings in their pride or speeds in the spear-shaft. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1240:Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave. ~ Clive James,
1241:There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun,
A Bliss in the heart’s crypt grown fiery white,
The heart of a world in which all hearts are one,
A Silence on the mountains of delight, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
1242:Driving the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge no monument’s in sight but fog prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog no icon lifts a lamp here history’s breath blotting the air over Gold Mountain ~ Adrienne Rich,
1243:If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst. ~ Randall Jarrell,
1244:Life renewed its ways which death and sleep cannot alter,
Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not,
Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1245:Mortals, your end is beatitude, rapture eternal his meaning:
Joy, which he most now denies, is his purpose: the hedges, the screening
Were but the rules of his play; his denials came to lure farther. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
1246:Publication there [in Nimbus] was to prove a turning point… The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964) ~ Patrick Kavanagh,
1247:These and other tools help poems call our attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes--when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities. ~ Tracy K Smith,
1248:Till then you must wait, I suppose, and instead of listening to Strong Reasoner and Co. write poems like the last ones and dream in your meditations of Krishna's dance and flute. That is the best way to bring him near you. ~ Sri AurobindoTo Dilip,
1249:Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew. ~ Louis Aragon,
1250:Beachy Head brims with electrical currents flying backwards and forwards, with the force of poems that have been well fought out and felt. I hear the currents of Alice Notley, of Bernadette Mayer, of Eileen Myles, and Sylvia Plath ~ Dorothea Lasky,
1251:hiding in this cage of visible matter is the invisible lifebird pay attention to her she is singing your song [2248.jpg] -- from Beloved May I Enter: Kabir dohas and other poems, Translated by Sushil Rao

~ Kabir, hiding in this cage
,
1252:I do bring my teaching together with my writing. I make students write in class, and do the same prompts I give them. I'm always on the lookout for teaching poems - poems that inspire me and my students to write poems in response. ~ Allison Joseph,
1253:I dwell in the spirit’s calm nothing can move
And watch the actions of Thy vast world-force,
Its mighty wings that through infinity move
And the Time-gallopings of the deathless Horse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness Spirit,
1254:Making it in poetry

The young teller
at the credit union
asked why so many
small checks
from universities?
Because I write
poems I said. Why
haven't I heard
of you? Because
I write poems
I said. ~ Bob Hicok,
1255:The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though “he was full of ideas.” “My dear Degas,” Mallarmé responded, “poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words. ~ St phane Mallarm,
1256:We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words. ~ Janet Frame,
1257:What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
1258:Yet his advance,
Attempt of a divinity within,
    A consciousness in the inconscient Night,
    To realise its own supernal Light,
Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,
1259:Yet in the midst of our labour and weeping not utterly lonely
Wander our steps, nor are terror and grief our portion only.
Do we not hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
1260:All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children. ~ Paul Auster,
1261:And then when you are actually in the moment and you see the time slipping away from you, you realize it wasn’t just something people said in songs and poems and books. It was something those people had actually felt and been through. ~ Dan Skinner,
1262:Back from his nature he drew to the passionless peaks of the spirit,
Throned where it dwells for ever uplifted and silent and changeless
Far beyond living and death, beyond Nature and ending of Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1263:Enjoy yourselves. And Hap: Don't let Umber near the arrows and bows; he's liable to shoot himself in the nose." Dodd grinned and snapped the reins, and the carriage rolled away.
Umber sniffed. "One of his lesser poems. Come, Hap. ~ P W Catanese,
1264:Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me. ~ Louis C K,
1265:He's probably their battle poet, too."
"You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?"
"No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy....When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode. ~ Terry Pratchett,
1266:How shall they prosper who haste after auguries, oracles, whispers,
Dreams that walk in the night and voices obscure of the silence?
Touches are these from the gods that bewilder the brain to its ruin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1267:Matt smirked. “Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry? ~ Jessica Park,
1268:Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby." ~ Michael Eric Dyson,
1269:Our souls travelling different paths have met in the ages
Each for its work and they cling for an hour to the names of affection,
Then Time’s long waves bear them apart for new forms we shall know not, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1270:Self-Giving
Hateful I hold him who sworn to a cause that is holy and common
Broods upon private wrongs or serving his lonely ambition
Studies to reap his gain from the labour and woe of his fellows. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1271:The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world’s greatest love poems, because they’re love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists. ~ lvaro de Campos,
1272:there are some poems
that we leave behind
some that leave us behind

while some just live
silently
in the heart

crumble, sometimes
dwindle
disappear
die

and are reborn
when you smile again. ~ Sanober Khan,
1273:Dead is the past; the void has possessed it; its drama is ended,
Finished its music. The future is dim and remote from our knowledge;
Silent it lies on the knees of the gods in their luminous stillness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1274:Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me. ~ Louis C K,
1275:Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer. Then, ~ Douglas Adams,
1276:That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though. ~ Jane Green,
1277:All eyes that look on me are my sole eyes;
The one heart that beats within all breasts is mine.
The world’s happiness flows through me like wine,
Its million sorrows are my agonies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,
1278:Each of us bears his punishment, fruit of a seed that’s forgotten;
Each of us curses his neighbour protecting his heart with illusions:
Therefore like children we blame each other and hate and are angry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1279:I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene. ~ Peter Porter,
1280:Moved man’s tongue in its wrath looses speech that is hard to be pardoned,
Afterwards stilled we regret, we forgive. If all were resented,
None could live on this earth that is thick with our stumblings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1281:Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out. ~ Rumi,
1282:Pride is not for our clay; the earth, not heaven was our mother
And we are even as the ant in our toil and the beast in our dying;
Only who cling to the hands of the gods can rise up from the earth-mire. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1283:I'm not musically trained and I'm not all these other things. I'm creative with a keyboard and a drum machine, but I can't really make these perfect minimal musical executions - all the things that would be nice with all these refined poems. ~ Doseone,
1284:Sometimes tender, sometimes spiral-eyed-but always, as we say, 'of a mind' -Lily Brown's sonorous and cerebral poems can fire synapses you never knew you had. If you're careful, Rust or Go Missing will keep you on the edge of your head. ~ Graham Foust,
1285:The Bungalow 4 counselor was a twenty-year-old college student named Eric who had terrible acne and wrote poems about the local girls who worked in the kitchen and how their breasts looked lonely but also beautiful, like melted ice cream. ~ Kelly Link,
1286:The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words. ~ Samuel R Delany,
1287:I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die. ~ Umberto Eco,
1288:I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us. ~ Helen Dunmore,
1289:In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
1290:In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bashō instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Bashō answered, simply, “No. ~ Jane Hirshfield,
1291:Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound. ~ Christian Wiman,
1292:Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started. ~ Billy Collins,
1293:The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious). ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
1294:...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'... ~ Janet Frame,
1295:He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought:
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is caught. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,
1296:I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about. ~ James Arthur,
1297:I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that. ~ Miranda Cosgrove,
1298:I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters". ~ Alice Fulton,
1299:Oneness unknown to us dwells in these millions of figures and faces,
Wars with itself in our battles, loves in our clinging embraces,
Inly the self and the substance of things and their cause and their mover ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,
1300:Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain. ~ Dylan Thomas,
1301:The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us. ~ Jean Cocteau,
1302:This iron, brute, gigantic helpless toy
They call a world, this thing that turns and turns
And shrieks and bleeds and cannot stop, this victim
Broken and living yet on its own wheel, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
1303:What did you think?' I blurted out, heat rushing to my cheeks.
'Of what?'
'My writing.'
'Oh,'Ford said. He looked at me for a long moment before rising stiffly out of his lawn chair. 'I think the whole world should read your poems. ~ Amy Greene,
1304:When I edit the poems - and I do edit, which some people don't mean when they use the term "stream of consciousness" - I'm usually editing toward greater accuracy, which sometimes means more fragmentation, because that is the way I think. ~ Rachel Zucker,
1305:Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world? ~ Elizabeth Bishop,
1306:I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor. ~ Jack Prelutsky,
1307:Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form. ~ Etgar Keret,
1308:The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul! ~ Walt Whitman,
1309:those who have inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired them; the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, ~ Plato,
1310:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1311:Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails. ~ Donald Hall,
1312:I saw the shadows of the bears before I saw the bears themselves: huge they were, and pale, made of the pages of fierce books: poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear-shape, filled with words that could wound with their beauty. ~ Neil Gaiman,
1313:I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own. ~ James Arthur,
1314:I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano. ~ Gordon Getty,
1315:The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand … We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us. ~ Jean Cocteau,
1316:After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures. ~ Jack Prelutsky,
1317:Into this life which the sunlight bounds and the greenness has cradled,
Armed with strength we have come; as our strength is, so is our joyance.
What but for joyance is birth and what but for joyance is living? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1318:It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else. ~ Robert Harris,
1319:Leave to the gods their godhead and, mortal, turn to thy labour;
Take what thou canst from the hour that is thine and be fearless in spirit;
This is the greatness of man and the joy of his stay in the sunlight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1320:I gasp, because isn't that just exactly what I've been doing too: writing poems and scattering them to the winds with the same hope as Gram that someone, someday, somewhere might understand who I am, who my sister was, and what happened to us. ~ Jandy Nelson,
1321:I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false. ~ Charles Bukowski,
1322:with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,
1323:I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me. ~ Margaret Atwood,
1324:I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path. ~ Edward Hirsch,
1325:It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories. ~ Natalie Goldberg,
1326:Near to the quiet truth of things we stand
In this grey moment. Neither happy light
Nor joyful sound deceives the listening heart,
Nor Night inarms, the Mother brooding vast,
To comfort us with sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,
1327:Entering into writing a poem is an emotional endeavor for me as well as a spiritual and creative one. Having to write those poems for the inauguration, I started asking deeper questions about my cultural identity, and my connection to America. ~ Richard Blanco,
1328:I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark. ~ Andrea Gibson,
1329:I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times. ~ Maya Angelou,
1330:I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most         spiritual poems; And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality, For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul, and of         immortality. ~ Walt Whitman,
1331:Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind. ~ James Arthur,
1332:Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ~ Colson Whitehead,
1333:Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms. ~ Stanley Kunitz,
1334:Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott’s novels and all Byron’s poems!–then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. ~ George Eliot,
1335:still the body still the mind still the voice inside in silence feel the stillness move friends this feeling cannot be imagined [2248.jpg] -- from Beloved May I Enter: Kabir dohas and other poems, Translated by Sushil Rao

~ Kabir, still the body
,
1336:The gods have invented
Only one way for a man through the world, O my slavegirl Briseis,
Valiant to be and noble and truthful and just to the humble,
Only one way for a woman, to love and serve and be faithful. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1337:You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
1338:I like poems that are daggers that sing. I like poems that for all the power of the sentiments expressed, and all the power to upset and offend, are so well made that they’re achieved things. However much they upset you, they also affect you. ~ Frederick Seidel,
1339:I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. ~ Walt Whitman,
1340:I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. ~ Paul Auster,
1341:I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It's limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric "I" stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem. ~ Matthea Harvey,
1342:New mind, new moon. I've seen the great ocean made new. Ever since I've scoured my body and mind, I, Lalla, have been as new as new can be! [2579.jpg] -- from I Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, Translated by Ranjit Hoskote

~ Lalla, New mind, new moon
,
1343:...no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility. ~ Ben Lerner,
1344:Poets loved the full moon; they wrote thousands of poems about it, but it was the new moon that Veronika loved best because there was still room for it to grow, to expand, to fill the whole of its surface with light before its inevitable decline. ~ Paulo Coelho,
1345:I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination. ~ Billy Collins,
1346:In the power and splendor of the universe, inspiration waits for the millions to come. Man has only to strive for it. Poems greater than the Iliad, plays greater than Macbeth, stories more engaging than Don Quixote await their seeker and finder. ~ John Masefield,
1347:I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself, actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something, no maybe junior and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book. ~ Alice Walker,
1348:You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother. What an honor to hold hands with a child's imagination in this way. ~ Meg Medina,
1349:I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems. ~ Charles Bukowski,
1350:Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don't think their owners should be grateful to receive them. ~ Joseph Brodsky,
1351:The "biggest" poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the "Johari Window:" what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others. ~ Denise Duhamel,
1352:You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
1353:Has put the stars out ere the light,
And from their dewy cushions rise
Sweet flowers half-opening their eyes.
O pleasant then to feel as if new-born
The sweet, unripe and virgin air, the air of morn. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
1354:I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote. ~ Simon Armitage,
1355:What poems are doing is counterbalancing the mainstream tenor of our culture, which is to do, to be active, to be energetic and to prove one’s self… and one of the messages underlying all poems that move us is that we have nothing at all to prove ~ Jane Hirshfield,
1356:What though ‘tis true that the river of Life through the Valley of Peril
Flows! But the diamond shines on the cliffside, jacinth and beryl
Gleam in the crannies, sapphire, smaragdus the roadway bejewel, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,
1357:When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone. ~ Edward Hirsch,
1358:You leave behind your fine poems.
You leave behind your beautiful flowers. And the earth that was only leant to you. You ascend into the Light, O Quechomitl, you leave behind the flowers and the singing and the earth. Safe journey, O friend. ~ Aliette de Bodard,
1359:/Farsi The sum total of our life is a breath spent in the company of the Beloved. [1472.jpg] -- from Nobody, Son of Nobody: Poems of Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, Translated by Vraje Abramian

~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir, The sum total of our life is a breath
,
1360:Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you ~ E E Cummings,
1361:i am drunk from all the honey. i have been drinking. for days straight. every night i eat water until i fall asleep. i am trying to remember you, madiba. and let you go at the same time. i am throwing my weeping at the stars. — anger (grief poems) ~ Nayyirah Waheed,
1362:I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*. ~ William Carlos Williams,
1363:I was teaching myself notes from three and then by seven I'd figured out how to play some chords, and at school I used to love writing poems and poetry, so I guess I kind of put two and two together and that formed my songwriting from an early age. ~ Ella Henderson,
1364:My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself. ~ Alex Lemon,
1365:The verses which he published in various reviews from time to time, and the neatly copied poems which he sent to his friends, superiors, and important personages, were neither much better nor much worse than thousands of other verse products of the day. ~ Ivo Andri,
1366:A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme. ~ Italo Calvino,
1367:Graham’s poems make use of all the old lyric technologies, as ancient as the breath and the beating of the heart—rhythm, the managed intervals of line and stanza, the play of language against silence, and the transformations enacted by metaphor—enlisting ~ Anonymous,
1368:Guten Morgan
Guten Morgan was a limited edition print folio containing the poems
'Less is not better'
'Poetry comes and goes'
'Rainbow'
'Fled'
'Shadows'
'Zoo'
Images of the prints from this folio are viewable below.
~ Edwin Morgan,
1369:I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud. ~ Adrienne Rich,
1370:I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write. ~ Pat Conroy,
1371:Out and alas! earth’s greatest are earth and they fail in the testing,
Conquered by sorrow and doubt, fate’s hammerers, fires of her furnace.
God in their souls they renounce and submit to their clay and its promptings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1372:Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come. ~ C K Williams,
1373:You and I are from two different worlds."
"Nonsense. We have much in common. We both like books, dogs, poems, Sir Walter Scott, dogs - I could go on."
"You listed dogs twice."
"It does not matter; I still made my point."
"No, you haven't. ~ Karen Hawkins,
1374:a gospel of "conscientious sensuality' rushing in at favourable opportunities—all in a formless deliberate disorder, that is the impression up till now—I shall wait to see if there is something else.... ~ Sri Aurobindo1. A collection of poems by D. H. Lawrence (1929),
1375:My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love,
My body become Thy engine for earth-use;
In my nerves and veins Thy rapture’s streams shall move;
My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,
1376:Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive. ~ Richard Eberhart,
1377:She dreamed that night of chickweed, which was a strange thing to dream about. Chickweed is a low, weedy little plant, not very distinguished. No one writes poetry comparing their lovers to chickweed (or if they do, the poems are rarely well received). ~ T Kingfisher,
1378:To heal the evils and mistakes of Space
And change the tragedy of the ignorant world
Into a Divine Comedy of joy
And the laughter and the rapture of God’s bliss.
The Mother of God is mother of our souls ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Mother of God,
1379:Can the theater teach us to wait? To forestall our satisfaction? Poems teach us how to wait. The natural world makes us wait. Erik Satie teaches us how to wait. And so does much music. Will YouTube teach us how to wait? Will YouTube teach us how to die?   ~ Sarah Ruhl,
1380:It still hurt her to see their poems before her, printed in the curving Yeged-dai script, using Yegedin forms and the images so beloved of the Yegedin: the single pebble, the grasshopper at twilight, the song of a heartbroken lark sitting in a bent tree. ~ Yoon Ha Lee,
1381:I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound. ~ Anne Stevenson,
1382:Transient, we made not ourselves, but at birth from the first we were fashioned
Valiant or fearful and as was our birth by the gods and their thinkings
Formed, so already enacted and fixed by their wills are our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1383:By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them. ~ Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont,
1384:I have lost you, my brother
And your death has ended
The spring season
Of my happiness,
our house is buried with you
And buried the laughter that you taught me.
There are no thoughts of love nor of poems
In my head
Since you died. ~ Catullus,
1385:I hurried to the Post Office and was given two fat parcels, which I opened with the scissors in the kitchen. Shakespeare’s Collected Works, T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems and Plays, Oscar Wilde’s Collected Works and a book with photos of naked women. ~ Karl Ove Knausg rd,
1386:Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. ~ Muriel Rukeyser,
1387:The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing, and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well. ~ Mark Forsyth,
1388:Also, and again I intend no offense, the most meaningful and often harrowing adventures which I and many like me have experienced have had to do with the rearing of children. “Howl” does not deal with such adventures. Truly great poems never do, somehow. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
1389:Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. ~ Stephen Karam,
1390:I don't think of writing my poems for China or for the world. I mainly think of a small audience of friends and people I know. I am writing for that small group. They are not necessarily going to be able to read it, but that's what I have in mind when I write. ~ Bei Dao,
1391:It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship. ~ John Fuller,
1392:this then
will be my destiny:
scrabbling for pennies in dark tiny halls
reading poems I have long since become tired
of. and I used to think
that men who drove buses
or cleaned out latrines
or murdered men in alleys were
fools. ~ Charles Bukowski,
1393:I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it...forever. Or at least I'm going to try.' ~ Jason Silva,
1394:I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic. ~ June Jordan,
1395:A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it. ~ Rumer Godden,
1396:Beauty is truth's smile
when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror. ~
Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony
which is in the universal being;
truth the perfect comprehension of the universal mind.

~ Rabindranath Tagore, Poems On Beauty
,
1397:Besides, if she was able to get away, Dorothea would obtain the one thing that Avelina had dreamed of, written stories about, and imagined in many a long hour—true romantic love—about which the troubadours sang, the subject of epic poems and tales. No, ~ Melanie Dickerson,
1398:I had found one of the places on earth where any sensitive being feels exposed to powerful invisible forces and himself suddenly naked and attacked on every side by air, light, space - all that brings the soul close to the surface. There the poems flowed out. ~ May Sarton,
1399:In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading Render how deeply I was handing everything over. ~ Nikky Finney,
1400:I think I like my brain best
in a bar fight with my heart.
I think I like myself a little broken,
with rough edges, a little harder
to grasp. I like poetry
better than therapy anyway.
The poems never judge me
for healing wrong. ~ Clementine von Radics,
1401:I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics. ~ Yehuda Amichai,
1402:Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort. It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn’t. ~ Christina Baker Kline,
1403:Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless. ~ Donald Hall,
1404:We dance, we dance. You hold the thread of my soul. You spin, you spin. And you unravel the part from the whole. We laugh, we laugh. I'm so far from where I began. I fall, I fall. And I forget that I am.-from Golden Tongue:The Poems of Steven Slaughter ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
1405:William Spiver said that the universe was expanding…that means there will be more of everything! More cheese puffs, more jelly sandwiches, more words, more poems, more love. And more giant donuts…maybe even gianter donuts. Is gianter a word? It should be. ~ Kate DiCamillo,
1406:And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, "Wild Gratitude," and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title "August 13th." ~ Edward Hirsch,
1407:Bryan [Iguchi] had this beautiful philosophy about our connection with these incredible cycles. There's a line from one of his poems that always stays with me about 'This process we follow; this cycle we ride' and it's almost become a strap line for the film. ~ Travis Rice,
1408:But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
1409:It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems—he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers. ~ Ted Hughes,
1410:I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years. There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back. They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home. ~ Adrian Matejka,
1411:Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. ~ Rabindranath Tagore,
1412:When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth. ~ lvaro de Campos,
1413:You should go from place to place recovering the poems that have been written for you to which you can affix your signature. Don't discuss these matters with anyone. Retrieve. Retrieve. When the basket is full someone will appear to whom you can present it. ~ Leonard Cohen,
1414:But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
1415:If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard. ~ James Arthur,
1416:This narrow path beneath the great trees is edged darkly with thick greening moss. We keep it swept clean before the gate, in expectation of wandering mountain monks. from Bamboo Cottage: Poems and Translations, by Doug Westendorp

~ Wang Wei, Temple Tree Path
,
1417:For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are severally possessed. ~ Plato,
1418:I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come from, and I feel, at least in the beginning, that I'm taking dictation from my own dream that I don't remember. ~ Mary Jo Salter,
1419:Poems On Love Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom. Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it. Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted. ~ Rabindranath Tagore,
1420:The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. [A]ll poems are an attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time. ~ David Whyte,
1421:What
Would
Happen if God leaned down

And gave you a full wet
Kiss?

Hafiz
Doesn't mind answering astronomical questions
Like that:

You would surely start
Reciting all day, inebriated,

Rogue-poems
Like
This. ~ Daniel Ladinsky,
1422:As if channeling Robbe-Grillet, who strove to establish 'new relations between man and the world,' Sesshu Foster's electrifying prose poems tenderly examine then fiercely weave stark-and-broken realities into luminous dream-like narratives on the game of life. ~ Wanda Coleman,
1423:Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science. ~ Jim Morrison, in The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision,
1424:I held her
wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred,
centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and
sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted.
there was no creature living as foul as I
and all my poems were
false. ~ Charles Bukowski,
1425:I would like to try to write poetry that would do everything I wanted poems to do, but also be readable by any person. I didn't know if this was possible, but I suddenly knew, in that few-times-in-a-lifetime sort of way, that this would be my life's search. ~ Matthew Zapruder,
1426:Who can point out the way of the gods and the path of their travel,
Who shall impose on them bounds and an orbit? The winds have their treading,–
They can be followed and seized, not the gods when they move towards their purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1427:If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
1428:Perhaps the heart of God for ever sings
And worlds come throbbing out from every note;
Perhaps His soul sits ever calm and still
And listens to the music rapturously,
Himself adoring, by Himself adored. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,
1429:All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person. ~ Hermann Hesse,
1430:The Song of Man,” one of Reuben’s favorite poems, mentioned age, disease, and hunger as the Three Cruelties of Humanity. Fat Horace was clearly hunger. Pasty-faced, pockmarked Willard was disease, and age was given to Dills, who at seventeen was the oldest. ~ Michael J Sullivan,
1431:Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there-- put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet. ~ Daniel Handler,
1432:Soul, my soul
   Soul, my soul, yet ascend crossing the marge of life:
   Mount out far above Time, reach to the golden end
   ... Live there lost in God space, rapturous, vacant, mute,
   Sun-bright, timeless, immense, single and absolute.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
1433:While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. ~ Hans Arp,
1434:And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up. ~ Alice Walker,
1435:In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems,we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations... the poetic image,in its newness,opens a future of language ~ Gaston Bachelard,
1436:Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect. ~ Martin Amis,
1437:But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck! ~ Robert Graves,
1438:Ah, hello." He gathered his courage. This was just like reading poetry, but subtract poems and add people casually placing hunting knives and daggers on their tables. One of the women was filing her fingernails into sharp points, like claws. Just like reading poetry. ~ Cynthia Hand,
1439:There is dew
on these poems in the morning,
and at night a cool breeze may rise from them.

In the winter they are blankets, in the summer a place to swim.

I like talking to you like this. Have you moved
a step closer?

Soon we may be
kissing. ~ Kabir,
1440:This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published. ~ Roberto Bola o,
1441:Then as now men walked in the round which the gods have decreed them
Eagerly turning their eyes to the lure and the tool and the labour.
Chained is their gaze to the span in front, to the gulfs they are blinded
Meant for their steps. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1442:If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, or how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people."

"And a lot fewer poems and plays," I said, laughing as I splashed about in the scented water. ~ Sherwood Smith,
1443:One of Hale’s favorite poems echoed Jesus’s command in the Sermon on the Mount: Man’s judgment errs, but there is One who “doeth all things well.” Ever, throughout the voyage of life, this precept keep in view: “Do unto others as thou wouldst that they should do to you. ~ David Grann,
1444:(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience. ~ Willie Nelson,
1445:I returned to my pillow and comforter, both of which I loved; they smelled like lavender, and were so cozy, poems should be written about their epic cozy wonder. I snuggled against their softness and willed away the touch of anxiety I felt about my mom’s strange behavior. ~ Penny Reid,
1446:It is certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and took little part in the strife of factions, gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine verse. ~ Thomas B Macaulay,
1447:loved the poems so much that I decided to try writing one. Feels real good to just write out lines about whatever you’re feeling. You should try it sometime.” “It sounds very good, sir.” “I wrote one for Cindy, but she didn’t like it much, so I just write for myself now. ~ Imbolo Mbue,
1448:Mythologies & religions are great poems and point infallibly through all things and events to the ubiquity of a 'presence' or 'eternity' that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries and all mystic traditions are in accord ~ Joseph Campbell,
1449:In his prison poems, the bars on his windows are merely the grid through which he sees shooting stars, each lash of a whip is a reminder of the insecurity of tyrants, and a rumour that orders for his execution have been dispatched is reason to weep for the executioner. ~ Kamila Shamsie,
1450:Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me- nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston,
1451:Some poems take two to three years to finish. Rarely, a poem will arrive whole. It's nice when that happens. However, process has become so grueling for me over the past few years that when one of my students uses the word "inspiration" I practically shriek with laughter. ~ Cate Marvin,
1452:Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ~ Colson Whitehead,
1453:I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why. ~ Diane Wakoski,
1454:poems. (illustration ill.32) On May 12, the whole party came out onto the terrace to watch Shelley’s schooner-rigged ship skim into the bay, heeling sharply and trailed by a dark foamy wake. “She is a most beautiful boat,” Shelley exclaimed with delight. However, Mary ~ Charlotte Gordon,
1455:The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader and that meaning doesn't exist or in here in poems alone. ~ Edward Hirsch,
1456:Wherever
we walk
we will make

Wherever
we protest
we will go planting

Make poems
seed grass
feed a child growing
build a house
Whatever we stand against
We will stand feeding and seeding

Wherever
I walk
I will make ~ Muriel Rukeyser,
1457:Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right. ~ Donald Hall,
1458:I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer. ~ Marilyn Hacker,
1459:Loving humans
means
writing poems & songs
novels & plays, slogans, chants
& protest signs
our critics
want
to stone
us for
while
we think of
them
as people
under different
circumstances
we might
be able
to help ~ Alice Walker,
1460:I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them. ~ Anne Stevenson,
1461:I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in. Todd ~ Patti Smith,
1462:[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don’t see. ~ Garth Greenwell,
1463:Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding? ~ Kathleen Raine,
1464:You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls . ~ Merce Cunningham,
1465:For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard. ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell,
1466:Greater it seems to my mind to be king over men than their slayer,
Nobler to build and to govern than what the ages have laboured
Putting their godhead forth to create or the high gods have fashioned,
That to destroy in our wrath of a moment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1467:Most poems I’ve seen are about love or sex or the stars. You poets are obsessed with stars. Falling stars. Shooting stars. Dying stars.” “Stars are important,” I say, laughing. “Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. ~ Nicola Yoon,
1468:Such were a dream of some sage at night when he muses in fancy,
Imaging freely a flawless world where none were afflicted,
No man inferior, all could sublimely equal and brothers
Live in a peace divine like the gods in their luminous regions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1469:All things are subject to sweet pleasure,
But three things keep her richest measure,
The breeze that visits heaven
And knows the planets seven,
The green spring with its flowery truth
Creative and the luminous heart of youth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,
1470:Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me. ~ Jane Campion,
1471:I cannot imagine a life without books.
Without Father's stories of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses, without pirate stories and fairy tales and poems. Without the hope of another way, of freedom and adventure beyond what we have here and now. How dark life would be. ~ Jessica Spotswood,
1472:I don't remember the first poem that I wrote because I've been creating poems since I was around 2 or 3. I don't have any memory of that but my mom has written evidence of it. I've always liked playing with words so when I was younger it had a lot more to do with rhyme and sounds. ~ Sarah Kay,
1473:It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that. ~ Clive James,
1474:Lizzie Harris's Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide. ~ Rachel Zucker,
1475:the love between Rosalind and Orlando. How can you live up to that? How can you possibly find a man in twenty-first-century America who would paper an entire forest with love poems to you? Well, Rose will tell you, you can’t. And if he did, he would probably also be rather creepy. ~ Anonymous,
1476:Don't flail about like a man wearing a blindfold. Believe me, He's in here. Come in and see for yourself. You'll stop hunting for Him all over. [2579.jpg] -- from I Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, Translated by Ranjit Hoskote

~ Lalla, Dont flail about like a man wearing a blindfold
,
1477:So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I've written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you're looking for. ~ Edward Hirsch,
1478:A month alone behind closed doors forgotten books, remembered, clear again. Poems come, like water to the pool Welling, up and out, from perfect silence [2158.jpg] -- from A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry, Edited by J. P. Seaton / Edited by Dennis Maloney

~ Yuan Mei, Just Done
,
1479:First tweet, best tweet, I always think. I try not to work them too much or else they get Pie Dough Disease, which is where the dough has been to too much college and doesn't understand that it is dough anymore and refuses to be shaped. Pie Dough Disease! Poems get that too. ~ Patricia Lockwood,
1480:I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets. ~ Charles de Lint,
1481:When I stop getting tripped up by your crooked heart and your small hands, I will want to go over all of your poems with white out. I will want to rinse your name out of my mouth, snuff out all the evidence that I thought the sun and moon of you because the world was not enough. ~ Trista Mateer,
1482:Art is not one great act of creation, but many small ones. When you read one of my poems, you fail to see the weeks of careful work it took me to build it--the thinking, the scratched-out words, the pages I burned in disgust. All you see, in the end, is what I want you to see. ~ Samantha Shannon,
1483:I've been working on a collection of prose vignettes about girls I've had crushes on, from the age of six to the age of eighteen. This manuscript is thematic and organized in a way my poems about my friends aren't. My friends get into the poems simply because they mean a lot to me. ~ Ron Padgett,
1484:I've changed over my writing life. If I can generalize, I would say that the more recent poems - believe it or not - are more pointedly political; although, if the earlier poems were more existential, they were still political; though, in their own way, had a complicated presence. ~ Gerald Stern,
1485:Still now I send letters into space
Hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down
And recognise you from the descriptions in my poems
That he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you,
There is a girl who still writes you, she doesn't know how not to ~ Sarah Kay,
1486:The knowledge of mortals is bound unto blindness.
Either only they walk mid the coloured dreams of the senses
Treading the greenness of earth and deeming the touch of things real,
Or if they see, by the curse of the gods their sight into falsehood ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1487:Will you read some of your poems?” “Christ, no.” “Why not?” “I just want to drink.” “You talk about drinking a lot in your books. Do you think drinking has helped your writing?” “No. I’m just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.” I ~ Charles Bukowski,
1488:All over earth men wept and bled and laboured, world-wide
Sowing Fate with their deeds and had other fruit than they hoped for,
Out of desires and their passionate griefs and fleeting enjoyments
Weaving a tapestry fit for the gods to admire, who in ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1489:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud.
This by pain we prevent; we compel his ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1490:Men must sow earth with their hearts and their tears that their country may prosper;
Earth who bore and devours us that life may be born from our remnants.
Then shall the Sacrifice gather its fruits when the war-shout is silent,
Nor shall the blood ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1491:Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder. ~ R S Thomas,
1492:Only one doom irreparable treads down the soul of a nation,
Only one downfall endures; ‘tis the ruin of greatness and virtue,
Mourning when Freedom departs from the life and the heart of a people,
Into her room comes creeping the mind of the slave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1493:Reading Aloud
ONCE we read Tennyson aloud
In our great fireside chair;
Between the lines my lips could touch
Her April-scented hair.
How very fond I was, to think
The printed poems fair,
When close within my arms I held
A living lyric there!
~ Christopher Morley,
1494:Some of my favorite poems are "confessional" poems written in the voices of aliens ("Southbound on the Freeway" by May Swenson" and "Report from the Surface" by Anthony McCann), sheep ("Snow Line" by John Berryman) or a yak ("The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia" by Oni Buchanan). ~ Matthea Harvey,
1495:The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
1496:Then if the tempest be loud and the thunderbolt leaping incessant
Shatters the roof, if the lintels flame at last and each cornice
Shrieks with the pain of the blast, if the very pillars totter,
Keep yet your faith in Zeus, hold fast to the word of ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1497:All whose eyes can pierce that curtain, gaze into dimness;
This they have glimpsed and that they imagine deceived by their natures
Seeing the forms in their hearts of dreadful things and of joyous;
As in the darkness our eyes are deceived by shadows ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1498:Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones. ~ Dexter Palmer,
1499:Earth that was wakened by pain to life and by hunger to thinking
Left to her joys rests inert and content with her gains and her station.
But for the unbearable whips of the gods back soon to her matter
She would go glad and the goal would be missed ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,
1500:Evil is worked, not justice, when into the mould of our thinkings
God we would force and enchain to the throb of our hearts the immortals,—
Justice and Virtue, her sister,—for where is justice mid creatures
Perfectly? Even the gods are betrayed by o ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,

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