Famous Quotes

When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!

~ Alfred Tennyson

Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state,perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and herewere every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.

~ Dante Alighieri

In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.

~ Stanley Kunitz

Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.

~ Joyce Cary

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Everything is all right,When you’re here,When you’re right next to me,When my hand is in yours,Don’t leave me,Don’t leave me empty handed.

~ Elizabeth Brooks

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

~ Walt Whitman

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

~ Aberjhani

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreamsOf the beautiful Annabel Lee,And the stars never rise but i feel the bright eyesOf the beautiful Annabel Lee.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

~ Pablo Neruda

Twas the night before Thanksgiving. All the food's in the oven. And I'm in the bedroom performin' self lovin'.

~ Craig Ferguson

When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.

~ A. Saleh

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

~ John Donne

A fallen blossomreturning to the bough, I thought --But no, a butterfly.

~ Arakida Moritake

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

~ José Martí

Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.

~ Pablo Neruda

I have been happy, though in a dream.I have been happy-and I love the theme:Dreams! in their vivid colouring of lifeAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

~ Helen Keller

And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.

~ Tom Schulman

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

~ Kahlil Gibran

I found the poems in the fields,And only wrote them down.

~ John Clare

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket.Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes.I know that some people like:sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,but you take me as I am and neverforget to pack an umbrella.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.Aristotle

~ Bruce Wayne Sullivan

I saw my face todayAnd it looked older,Without the warmth of wisdomOr the softnessBorn of pain and waiting.The dreams were gone from my eyes,Hope lost in hollownessOn my cheeks,A finger of deathPulling at my jaws.So I did my push-upsAnd wondered if I'd ever find you,To see my faceWith friendlier eyes than mine.

~ James Kavanaugh

A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick. If, when you see the symptoms, you can tell, Your cure is quick.A sound man knows that sickness makes him sick and before he catches it his cure is quick.

~ Lao Tzu

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

~ T.s. Eliot

My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.

~ Dorothy Parker

Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

In fact she herself once blamed meKyprogeneiabecause I prayed this word:I want.

~ Sappho

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

~ Charles Baudelaire

For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.

~ Amy Lowell

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?

~ Emily Brontë

I see your picture and in that picture I didn't see you.

~ Santosh Kalwar

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.

~ Fran Lebowitz

I thought my fireplace dead and stirred the ashes. I burned my fingers.

~ Antonio Machado

so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...So ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in.

~ Leonard Cohen