Random Quotes
The Fourth Saturday in Barnes & Noble May 28, 2016 - photo by Bella Che
I collect quotes. Some serve as prompts, others epigraphs. My favorites are woven into books.
"The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself.' That's it." - Linus Torvalds
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research would it?" - Albert Einstein
"Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love." - Albert Einstein
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe." - Albert Einstein
“We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.” - Albert Einstein
"Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does..." - Groucho Marx
”Writing a novel is a lot like driving a car at night, you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” E. L. Doctorow
"...was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking... he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which." - Douglas Adams
"My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso." - Pablo Picasso
"No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot be denied--it speaks in silence to the very core of your being." - Ansel Adams
"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." - Charles Bukowski
"The bottoms of my shoes are clean from walking in the rain." - Jack Kerouac
"Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: 'For my sake was the world created,' and in his left: 'I am dust and ashes.'" - Hasidic saying
"The moon is a sow
and grunts in my throat
Her great shining shines through me
so the mud of my hollow gleams
and breaks in silver bubbles"
- Denise Levertov, ‘Song for Ishtar’ from O Taste and See
"It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm." - Mary Henle
"To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense." - Ayn Rand
"I suppose we acquire most of our feelings about our bodies too early, and in ways too complicated, to make them easy to account for." - Charis Wilson
"The body says what words cannot." - Martha Graham
"Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart, don't know how to laugh either." - Golda Meir
"Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from." - Jodie Foster
"It is hard to fail, but it is worse to never have tried to succeed." - Mia Hamm
"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." - Anne Sexton
"Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!" - Fannie Flagg
"You can't underestimate the power of fear." - Patricia Nixon
"It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anais Nin
"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." - Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City
"In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." - Agnes de Mille
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
"The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness." - Stephen Spender
"One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives." - Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
"Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at the edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about the spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to understand our relationship to the whole universe." - Ruth Bernhard
"The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings." - Ruth Bernhard
"She lives a sophisticate's life among worldly people. At the slightest excuse she steps out of civilization, naked and relieved, as I should step out of a soiled chemise." - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
"I totally disagree with the belief that nature was only made for the use of people. Human beings are not the center of the universe, and, if they are to sustain themselves, it is vitally important for them to be awakened to how closely they are linked with the rest of nature." - Wynn Bullock
"Human beings to me are as much a part of nature as trees or birds, and the unclothed body expresses this belongingness directly and powerfully." - Wynn Bullock
"Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs." - Edgard Varese
"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail." - Edwin Land
"If the individual is narrowly concentrated on the goal, to the exclusion of other relevant aspects of the problem situation, he is often unable to achieve a solution. The creative thinker must stand sufficiently detached from his work." - Mary Henle
"A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistence of unsuspecting musicians." - Frank Zappa
Playing guitar with this band is like trying to grow WATERMELON IN EASTER HAY." - Frank Zappa
"Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear." - Frank Zappa
"The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged." - May Sarton
"If these great men must have outdoor memorials let them be in the form of handsome blocks of buildings for the poor"- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility with no history to guide them, and with a kind of courage to make themselves vulnerable which I find moving beyond words." - Gloria Steinem
"Some things arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever." - Gail Godwin
"I would like...to see us take hold of ourselves, look at ourselves, and cease being afraid." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"No one worth possessing can be quite possessed. That includes one's self." - Sara Teasdale
"The worst of doing one's duty is that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else." - Edith Wharton
"Art disease is caused by hardening of the categories." - Adina Reinhardt
"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been." - Madeline L'Engle
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Madeleine L'Engle
"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts." - Ray Bradbury, 'GBS - Mark V' from I Sing the Body Electric!
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw, <i>Maxims for Revolutionists
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." - William Blake
"I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks. All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes, or of appearing naive." - Abraham Maslow, Eupsychian Management
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail." - Abraham Maslow
"Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once he grows up." - Pablo Picasso
"Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion." - Dorothy Parker
"I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it." - Gertrude Stein
"The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic." - Gertrude Stein
"After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others." - Edith Wharton
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there." - Clare Boothe Luce
"When a man can't explain a woman's actions, the first thing he thinks about is the condition of her uterus." - Clare Boothe Luce
"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is." - Willa Cather
"We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids." - Willa Cather
"Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible." - Margaret Mead
"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle." - Hannah Arendt
"The kiss. There are all sorts of kisses, lad, from the sticky confection to the kiss of death. Of them all, the kiss of an actress is the most unnerving. How can we tell if she means it or if she's just practicing?" - Ruth Gordon
"Why should ruts be so comfortable and so unpopular?" - Ruth Gordon
"When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place." - Pearl Buck
"The kiss was so much a part of the routine that it embarrassed him to withhold it." - Faith Baldwin
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets." - Arthur Miller
"Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet--whom Plato banned from his Republic--may rise up to save us all." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"The ghetto was not only a place of refuge for a persecuted minority but a great experiment in peace, in self-discipline and in humanism. As such it still exists and refuses to give up in spite of all the brutality that surrounds it. I was brought up among those people." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"A couple of poems I like a year look like a lot when they come out, but in fact are points of satisfaction separated by large vacancies." - Sylvia Plath
“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have a pure motive (O-it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing." - Sylvia Plath
"Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child." - Carl Sandburg
"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work." - Carl Sandburg
"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance." - Carl Sandburg
"When one's not writing poems, you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach." - May Sarton
"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently." - Jean Cocteau
"There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them." - Jean Cocteau
"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." - D.H. Lawrence
"I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies—thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us." - D.H. Lawrence
"Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house. It's as though I could fly, almost, and I get very tense before I've told the truth--hard. Then I sit down at the desk and get going with it." - Anne Sexton
"I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it." - Anne Sexton
"There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book." - Carson McCullers
"Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped." - Lillian Hellman
"The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God's joke on humanity. It is man's last desperate stand at superintendency." - Bette Davis
"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet." - Samuel Beckett
"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." - Samuel Beckett
"I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo." - Samuel Beckett
"There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium." - Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape
"It is so basic. A human being is an innocent part of nature. Our civilization has distorted this universal quality that allows us to feel at home in our skin. Other animals have coats that they accept, but the human race has yet to come to terms with being nude." - Ruth Bernhard
"How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" - Katherine Mansfield
"Whatever the reasons, I enjoyed being nude; it felt natural to me. I got the same kind of pleasure from being free of clothing that many people get from being well dressed." - Charis Wilson
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." - George Bernard Shaw
"To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble." - Robyn Davidson, Tracks
"Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - E. E. Cummings
"Most people want security in this world, not liberty." - H. L. Mencken
"Of all the strange 'crimes' that human beings have legislated out of nothing, 'blasphemy' is the most amazing, with 'obscenity' and 'indecent exposure' fighting it out for second and third place." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." - Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false." - Paul Valery
"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics." - Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption
"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." - H. L. Mencken
"Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside." - Loren Eiseley, Strangeness in the Proportion
"Madness is rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves." - Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
"It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself." - Loren Eiseley, The Mind as Nature
"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so." - Bertrand Russell
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - William James
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form." - Albert Einstein
"Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us." - Loren Eiseley, The Mind as Nature
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst<br>Are full of passionate intensity."<br>- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic." - Anais Nin
"Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth." - Anais Nin
"Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage." - Anais Nin
"The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned." - Anais Nin
"The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive." - Anais Nin
"The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them." - Anais Nin
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection." - Anais Nin
"Beginnings are apt to be shadowy." - Rachel Carson
"The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man." - Rachel Carson
"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him." - Rachel Carson
"The ocean is a place of paradoxes." - Rachel Carson
"I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours." - Edna Ferber
"I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion." - Edna Ferber
"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!" - Edna Ferber
"You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself." - Edna Ferber
"Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them." - Flannery O'Connor
"The meaning of the story is the story." - Flannery O'Connor
"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention." - Flannery O'Connor
"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay." - Flannery O'Connor
"You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him." - Flannery O'Connor
“The truth does not change based on your ability to stomach it." - Flannery O'Connor
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." - Flannery O'Connor
"The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof." - Mary McCarthy
"Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents." - Marilyn Monroe
"My work is the only ground I've ever had to stand on. I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation--but I'm working on the foundation." - Marilyn Monroe
"Until they come to see us from their planet, I wait patiently. I hear them saying: Don't call us, we'll call you." - Marlene Dietrich
"There comes a time when suddenly you realize that laughter is something you remember and that you were the one laughing." - Marlene Dietrich
"The experience gave me shivers. It was magic, a spiritual fix. There is no limit to what one can do with photography. One can express beauty, ugliness, love, hate, war and serenity. There is no need for a translator, a set, script or toe shoes." - Eva Rubinstein
"(Photography) is putting the mind, the eye, and the heart on the same line of sight." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
"We do not take the photographs, they take us." - Eva Rubinstein
"What moves me then, is not coming from something sensational or from pure geometry, but from a thought made sensitive" - Regis Durand
"Learn, says the goddess, what the two paths to knowledge are. One starts from the principle that only being exists, and that nothingness doesn't ; this is certitude, truth. The other starts from the principle that being is not, that nothingness is necessary. I tell you that this path goes contrary to reason. For you can neither know, nor reach, nor express what is not. Saying and thinking bear on being. Being is, and nothingness is not". - Parmenides
"That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry." - Jacques Maritain
"It is not with impunity that one is soft, polished, reasonable, patient, day after day, year after year." - Samuel Beckett
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great crisis, maintain their nuetrality." - Dante
"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." - Bertolt Brecht
"Those who are willing to sacrifice essential liberties for a little order will lose both and deserve neither." - Benjamin Franklin
"Our personal growth can fuel our photography and our photography can fuel our personal growth." - Brooks Jensen
"For the camera, the creative moment is brief--a compelling, ephemeral collision of event and artist. Extreme awareness combined with unobtrusiveness becomes the contest the photographer must work within." - Ken Ruth
"When you begin viewing the world through a camera lens, your senses sharpen as your mind and eyes are forced to focus on people and things never before noticed or thought about. I discovered that even if I didn't always take a picture, the simple act of carrying a camera and searching for something to photograph greatly sharpened my own powers of observation and allowed me to experience much more of life." - Kent Reno
"In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
"Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, ever hundredth of a second." - Marc Riboud
"Photography is the ideal medium in which to challenge assumptions, because of all art forms, it is one people most expect to represent reality... The creative photographer grapples with these expectations, shaping or altering reality by the way he or she approaches a subject." - Keith A. Boas
"The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me." - Andre Kertesz
"To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place.... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them." - Elliott Erwitt
"Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual." - Edward Weston
"We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect.... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs." - Aaron Siskind
"To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
"I am not interested in shooting new things--I am interested to see things new." - Ernest Haas
"Digital truths make for analog lies." - Mark Rabiner
"The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness." - D.H. Lawrence
"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does." - Allen Ginsberg
"Poetry allows one to speak with a power not granted by culture." - Linda McCarriston
"I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself. I just think that they make really crappy operating systems." - Linus Torvalds
"We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." - Henry James
"The whole aim of practical politicians is to keep the public alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H. L. Mencken
"Outside of a dog, books are man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." - Helen Keller
"Let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." - Dr. Martin Luther King
"It is time to speak your truth, each of you. Do not look outside yourself for the leader. There is a river flowing very fast. Trust the river has its destination. You must let go of the shore, push off into that river. Keep your eyes open and your heads above the water. See who is in there with you and celebrate. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves. We are the ones we have been waiting for...." - Hopi Elders in Arizona
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"The great creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible... But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won." - Ayn Rand
"The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse - The Birthmark
"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent." - Victor Hugo
"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness." - Maya Angelou
"Where words fail, music speaks." - Hans Christian Andersen
"We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it." - John Lennon
"While we may not be able to control all that happens to us, we can control what happens inside us." - Benjamin Franklin
"The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too." - Samuel Butler
"Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth." - Muhammad Ali
"The man who has no imagination has no wings." - Muhammad Ali
"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life." - Muhammad Ali
"She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not care to be herself." - Anais Nin
"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together." - Anais Nin
"I improvised, crazed by the music. . . . Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone." - Josephine Baker
"A few weeks after my surgery, I went out to play catch with my golden retriever. When I bent over to pick up the ball, my prosthesis fell out. The dog snatched it, and I found myself chasing him down the road yelling 'Hey, come back here with my breast!'" - Linda Ellerbee
"You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, 'My God, you're right! I never would've thought of that!'" - Dave Barry
"Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through the snow." - Jeff Valdez
"Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later." - Mary Bly
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?" - Hillel, Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers)
"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own." - Susan Sontag
"What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine." - Susan Sontag
"I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams." - Susan Sontag
"That's all the difficulty and the challenge and the battle: to look through this mechanical thing, these bits of glass and metal, at someone. And not lose the sense that this 'shape' is a human being." - Eva Rubinstein
"It is not incumbent upon us to finish the work but we are not free to desist from it." - Hillel, Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers)
"America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nations' greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when the questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us." - John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Amherst College, October 1963
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground." - Frederick Douglass
"In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher." - The Dalai Lama
"We are the best entertained and least informed people on the face of the Earth." - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have peace." - Jimi Hendrix
"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." - John F. Kennedy
"People are bloody ignorant apes." - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
"Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them." - Albert Einstein
"When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick." - George Burns
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." - Thucydides
"One of the perks of being an unemployed musician is that you get to play much less bad music." - Jack Daney
"Jazz is too good for America." - Dizzy Gillespie
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley
"Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself." - Igor Stravinsky
"The drummer drives. Everybody else rides!" - Panama Francis
"Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins." - Dizzy Gillespie
"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one." - Duke Ellington
"Rather than simply say, I play jazz, I say I play music." - Kenny Garrett
"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time." - Ornette Coleman
"We never play anything the same way once." - Shelly Manne
"Music is a very hard instrument." - Vido Musso
"The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'" - (anonymous: talking about the Don Ellis band)
"If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton." - Chet Baker
"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
"Jazz is freedom. Now, you think about that." - Thelonious Monk
"To be a musician is a curse. To NOT be one is even worse." - Jack Daney
"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living." - Kirke Mecham
"Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day." - Ringo Starr
"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?" - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." - William F. Buckley, Jr.
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain
"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently." - James Gibbons Hunekar
"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." - Sergei Prokofiev
"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that has made giant strides in reverse." - Bing Crosby
"A ponderous orchestral absurdity." - Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic
"The bottom line of any country is, what did we contribute to the world? We contributed Louis Armstrong." - Tony Bennett
"I write so the endangered thoughts roaming naked and vulnerable through the misty jungles of my mind aren't slain by the guns of practical living." - Kim Krizan
"I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose." - John F. Kennedy
"I will keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished..."- Mary Oliver
"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do." - Georgia O'Keeffe
"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." - Elie Wiesel
"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what a feminist is, I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat" - Rebecca West, 1913
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." - Steve Jobs
"Irreverence is the champion of liberty." - Mark Twain
"So how do you inherit the earth? By being awake." - Joni Mitchell
"We are all born mad. Some remain so." - Samuel Beckett
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing." - Muhammad Ali
"A wild patience has taken me this far." - Adrienne Rich
"We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts." - Patrick Moynihan
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion." - Jack Kerouac
"Nearly every complex solution to a programming problem that I have looked at carefully has turned out to be wrong." - Brent Welch
"What have future generations ever done for us?" - Groucho Marx
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." - Bertrand Russell, Science and Religion
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
"Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them." - Stephane Mallarme
"Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced." - John Keats
"It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure." - Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)
"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." - Johnny Carson
The government you elect is the government you deserve." - Thomas Jefferson
"The people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
"The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows." - Frank Zappa
"The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath." - Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart
"In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love." - Marc Chagall
"What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" - Jack Kerouac
"I've always followed my father's advice: he told me, first to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody unintentionally. If I insult you, you can be goddamn sure I intend to. And, third, he told me not to go around looking for trouble." - John Wayne
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts." - Paul Erlich
Interviewer: "So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?"<br> Frank Zappa: "You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?"
"Talk to the bomb. Teach it phenomenology." - Doolittle to Powell in Dark Star (1973) John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon
"The important thing is not the camera but the eye." - Alfred Eisenstaedt
"See, I haven't led a literary life. These fellows, they really work away with their prose trying to describe themselves and understand themselves, and so on. I don't do that. I don't want to know too much about myself." - Robert Frost
"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when the're reading to themselves." - Don Marquis
"I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people." - Robert Bly
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." - Emily Dickinson
"If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them." - Margaret Drabble
"Whatever gets in the way of your work, is your work." - Sophie Cabot Black
"Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!" - Carolyn Kizer
"Poets are interested primarily in death and commas." - Carolyn Kizer
"I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts." - Aldous Huxley
"Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living." - Harold Pinter
"Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo." - Mary Pickford, 1925
"Don't worry about what anyone else thinks - write what you must." - Carl Phillips
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." - William Faulkner
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four
"Her life - that was the only chance she had - the short season between two silences." - Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
"I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist." - James Salter
"History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders." - Edna O'Brien
"What if the law of gravity just wears out and lets go and I drift into space?" - Elaine May
"Persistence in one opinion has never been considered a merit in political leaders. - Marcus Tullius Cicero, Ad familiares , 1st century BC
"Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done." - James J. Ling
"Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another." - Adam Smith
"If I love you more, will you suffer less?" - Elie Wiesel, quoting his five-year-old grandson at a Boston University lecture series.
“A photographer in doubt will get better results than a photographer caught up in the freedom of irony." - Torborn Rodland
"In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival." - May Sarton
"I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions." - Imre Kertesz
"Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one." - Mel Brooks
"Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head." - Christopher Logue
"I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in the world is fixed." - Frank Deford
"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." - Jack Kerouac
"Poetry is made in a bed like love
Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things"
- Andre Breton
"I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me." - Mary Ruefle
"Democracy becomes a government of bullies, tempered by editors." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What good is it if you talk in flowers, and they think in pastry?" - Ashleigh Brilliant
"While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in a windowpane." - Billy Collins
"A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. It takes on a life and a will of its own." - Stanley Kunitz
"I could dance with you till the cows come home. On second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows till you come home." - Groucho Marx
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein
"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." - Franz Kafka
"In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius." - Thomas Mann
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer
"Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs." - Kernighan
"The challenge is to remember that poetry must still dance. We can all think of poets who lost their sense of joy or humor when they assumed the burden of memory. Memory is the mother of the muses, who weren't dour figures. They were lovelies." - Ange Mlinko
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." - Albert Einstein
"Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, right up until the moment a picture is about to be taken, and then feeling takes over." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
"So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe." - Isaac Asimov
"Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It's a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup." - Gertrude Stein
"Anybody who is not shocked by quantum theory, has not understood it. - Niels Bohr
"Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone." - Adrienne Rich
"The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language." - Adrienne Rich
"Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." - Louis L'Amour
"Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers." - Tom Lehrer
"We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory." - Louise Gluck
"When one writes, there's the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear." - Deborah Eisenberg
"In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared." - Louis Pasteur
"Without hope, there is nothing." - Bob Gibson
"Beating yourself up is never a fair fight." - Andrea Gibson
"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering." - Robert Frost
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness." - Robert Frost
"We need magic and bliss, and power and myth, and celebration and religion in our lives and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it." - Jerry Garcia
"When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too." - Eudora Welty
"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be." - May Sarton
"I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest." - Alexandre Dumas
"There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it." - Man Ray, To Be Continued, Unnoticed, 1948
"Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place." - Robert Brault
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath
"I love my rejection slips. They show me I try." - Sylvia Plath
"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music." - Albert Einstein
"Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again." - Seamus Heaney
"In "...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor." - Fred Brooks, Jr.
"I can be changed by what happens to me. I refuse to be reduced by it." - Maya Angelou
"Being profound and seeming profound. Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity; those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound: it is so timid and dislikes going into the water." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom
"Art is not encumbered by limits rather every experience is a new window on the world." - Richard Fox
"Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements." - Norman Douglas
"Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers." - Chip Salzenberg
"Don't play what's there, play what's not there." - Miles Davis
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Winston Churchill
"I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation." - Satchel Paige
"After the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box." - Italian proverb
"The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first." - Blaise Pascal
"I am a collection of dismantled almosts." - Anne Sexton
"Out of used furniture she made a tree." - Anne Sexton
"To be awake is to be alive." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It's only that." - Edna St. Vincent Millay
"There is more power in telling little than in telling all." - Mark Rothko
"Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do." - Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
"I have a very small mind and must live with it." - Edsger W. Dijkstra
"There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet." - Ambrose Bierce
"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster." - Voltaire
"It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise." - Barbara Kingsolver
"Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences." - Brian Eno
"Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her." - Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
"A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend." - Lorrie Moore
"Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up." - Miles Davis
"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
"Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwords in a recasting. it will come if it is there and if you will let it come." - Gertrude Stein
"Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four." - Katharine Hepburn
"The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time." - Rod Serling, Creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’
"...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full." - Anne Sexton, The Break Away
"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable." - John Steinbeck
"In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words." - Paul Claudel
"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition." - Isaac Asimov
"Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met." - Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies
"If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading." - Henry Green
"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." - Kurt Vonnegut
"There is no royal road to geometry." - Euclid
"As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places." - Samuel Beckett, Murphy
"The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting." - T.H. White
"All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer." - Samuel Beckett, Humanistic Quietism 1934
"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that." - Samuel Beckett
"...verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good." - Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
"Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty." - Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
"His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets." - Dorothy Parker
"At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I'm 'passing the torch.' I explain that I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much-and I'm using it to light the torches of others. Because only if each of us has a torch will there be enough light." - Gloria Steinem
"I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts." - Frank Stanford
"It wasn't a dream it was a flood" - Frank Stanford
"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness." - John Muir
"Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door." - Wallace Stevens
“Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney." - Vincent van Gogh
"One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began." - Mary Oliver
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift." - Mary Oliver
"I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings." - Mary Oliver
"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
"As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert
"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." - George Orwell
"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the same way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." - Robert Frank
"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you." - Frida Kahlo
"But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human." - Kurt Vonnegut
"Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place." - Kurt Vonnegut
"You're the smart one. Why didn't you tell me life was a dream." - Allen Ginsberg, from a letter to Jack Kerouac
"The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like." - E.L. Doctorow
"Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men." - Joseph Conrad
"Ignorance is the parent of fear." - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard." - Anne Sexton
"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, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower and Other Love Poems
"I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way." - Simone de Beauvoir
"Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider, is chaos for the fly." - Morticia Addams
"A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem." - Juan Felipe Herrera
Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught." - Leslie Feinberg
"All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it." - Anne Sexton, from 'The Fury of Sunsets', The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton
"Whenever something new develops in poetry, many will argue, 'That's not poetry.' Think of the reception of William Carlos Williams...spoken word poets, poets who incorporate graphics, poets who write in code so robots can read them. It's all poetry." - Joyce Peseroff
"In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it's done right." - Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir
"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. White
"Your old men shall dream dreams, Your young men shall see visions." - Joel 2:28
"The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear." - Elizabeth Bishop
"I make no distinction between poetry and painting." - Joan Miro
"When you laugh at something horrible, you're just illuminating a different side of it that was already there. If you make something sad funny you're much more likely to remember it. It's a mnemonic device that makes our suffering rhyme with joy." - Max Ritvo
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." - Abraham Lincoln
"If I had the mentality that I have right now 20 years ago, who knows? I might be working for NASA. Experience goes a long way." - David Ortiz
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." - Albert Camus
"Every exit is an entry somewhere." - Tom Stoppard
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing." - Gertrude Stein
"When it is over I want to say I was the bride married to amazement; I was the bridegroom taking the whole world in my arms." - Mary Oliver
"They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics." - Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
"It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail." - Charles Bukowski
"It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone." - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
"Art makes us exercise the weakest muscle in the human body, the muscle of empathy." - Etgar Keret
"I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life." - Muhammad Ali
"The poet's first obligation is survival. No bolder challenge confronts the modern artist than to stay healthy in a sick world." - Stanley Kunitz
"O ye Gods, grant us what is good whether we pray for it or not, but keep evil from us even though we pray for it." - Plato
"and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song" - Rainer Maria Rilke
“I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8 to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30." - Groucho Marx
"The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?" - Paul Celan
"since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid."
- e e cummings
"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love." - Butch Hancock
"They're powerful, those songs. At times they've been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home." - Johnny Cash
"There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles." - Thomas Lux
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind." - Albert Einstein
"To me, hope is informed optimism." - Michael J. Fox
"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." - Edgar Degas
"Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done." - Amelia Earhart
"What surrounds us, here and now, is not guaranteed. It could just as well not exist - and so man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins. - Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry
"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
"The air is the only place free from prejudice." - Bessie Coleman
"Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? - Mary Oliver
“Don't talk unless you can improve the silence." - Jorge Luis Borges
"Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale." - William Carlos Williams
"Success is a lousy teacher - it seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." - Bill Gates
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is...the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." - Mark Twain
"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize." - James Joyce
"Anyway, what is the soul but a dream of itself?" - Alicia Ostriker
"You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky." - Amelia Earhart
"Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry." - Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)
"Love me like my demons do." - Akif Kichloo
"The greatest peril of misplaced worry is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living." - Seneca
"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible." - M. C. Escher
"I, who was never quite sure
about being a girl, needed another
life, another image to remind me."
- Anne Sexton, Double Image
"At times when I would rather be dead, the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me." - Frank O'Hara
"The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem." - May Swenson
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. - Abraham Lincoln
"To sum up all, let it be known that science and religion are two identical words. The learned do not suspect this, no more do the religious. These two words express the two sides of the same fact, which is the infinite. Religion-Science, this is the future of the human mind. - Victor Hugo
"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another." - Thomas Merton
"We are always interested in the flower, but not the tedium of the blossoming. But that process from bud to blossom is when things really happen. - Maria Popova
"The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment - to put things down without deliberation - without worrying about their style - without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote - wrote, wrote-...By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught." - Walt Whitman
"Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord." - John Cage
"...if you don't feel like you're on the verge of humiliating yourself - if you don't feel like you have no idea what you're doing - then you're not writing hard enough.' - John Irving
"Behind all seen things lies something vaster;
everything is but a path, a portal or a window
opening on something other than itself."
- Antoine de Saint-Exuphery, Wind, Sand and Stars
“Poetry...reconciles two aspects of mind that are otherwise sundered in most of our waking lives: the making of sense and the making of music, the rational and the spiritual. Poetry reconciles two severed aspects of ourselves." - Mark Tredinnick
"A woman with strong opinions had better have thick skin and a loud voice." - Anya Seton, The Winthrop Woman, 1959
“ Only I get to say I’m tragic.” - Anya Krugovoy Silver, “How to Talk to a Sick Woman” from Second Bloom
“You'll come to hate your own poems,
read them as pretty wisps of colorful thinking,
all those images just a splash of colored oil
sloshed over a pool gone rancid.
Admit it. Atheists always scared you. And no wonder.
Those nights you switched on the fan so no one
could hear you scream into your pillow, weeping
and biting your own hands like a motherless
monkey, banded to a body that despised you,
a suit of coals with a jammed-shut zipper.
Instead of the truth, you took refuge in stories
and souls, wore the word survivor like a pink nimbus.
All the while, my dear, I waited, knowing
you'd catch up to me one day. I'm holding the black-
backed mirror to your face. Look into it.”
- Anya Krugovoy Silver, “Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal” fromThe Ninety-Third Name of God
“Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.” - Josh Gibson
“I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
- Mary Oliver, “I Go Down To The Shore”
”I think the poem is a communication between a mouth and an ear—not an actual mouth and an actual ear, but a mind that sends a message and a mind that receives it.” - Louise Glück
”The poet is the priest of the invisible.” - Wallace Stevens, Adagio
“A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere - W.H. Auden, Shorts II
“For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain” - Michael Drayton, To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poesy
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” - T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood
“The poet is always indebted to the universe, paying interest and fines on sorrow” - Vladimir Mayakovsky, Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry
“All a poet can do today is warn.” - Wilfred Owen, Poems (preface)
”Sir, I admit your general rule
That every poet is a fool;
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet" - Alexander Pope, Epigram from the French
”Strength isn’t about how much you can handle before you break. I't’s about how much you can handle after you break.” - Clark Kelley Price
“As poets, we walk as poets, we walk as if we don't have skin.” - Patricia Fargnoli
“It’s a good thing folks cannot crack the heart and drop their insides in a frying pan like an egg. It’s a good thing a man cannot make an omelette out of your trouble.” - Langston Hughes
Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of his or her mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language he or she knows. It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way. This slow learning, the growth of this habit of inner attentiveness, is poetic development, and it is the substance of the poet’s art. Of course, this growth is rarely steady, never linear, and is sometimes not actually growth but diminishment―that’s all part of the compelling story of a poet’s way forward. - Craig Morgan Teicher
”If I print, ‘She was stark naked,’ and then proceeded to describe her person in detail, what critic would not howl? Who would venture to leave the book on a parlor table? But the artist does this and all ages gather around and look and talk and point.” - Mark Twain
”Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable… I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours… Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unbearable sound of the roses singing… If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.” - Mary Oliver
”A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
”Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” - Philip K. Dick, Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
“Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.” -Robert Frost
“What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you're not getting the whole thing that's there to be had."– Jerry Garcia
"Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world; knowing they’re going to light the bottom, and doesn’t get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation." - John Young
“As it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” - Thomas Jefferson
"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." - Frederick Pohl
”The world is like that—incomprehensible and full of surprises.” -Jorge Amado
“Music isn’t just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It’s a need, a deeper hunger; and when the music is right, it’s joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven.” - Orson Scott Card
“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.” - Helen Keller, Optimism
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
“They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.” - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
“The poet is always indebted to the universe, paying interest and fines on sorrow” - Vladimir Mayakovsky, Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Søren Kierkegaard
"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays." - Søren Kierkegaard
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." - Søren Kierkegaard
“In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punch line.“- Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
“Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.” —Lucille Clifton
“It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts”. - Aldous Huxley
“The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know. They don't even know what's going on at that remote and secret level of decision making. “ - Noam Chomsky
“Books were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.” - Matt Haig
“I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival”. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you." - Frida Kahlo
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King, Jr.