E. E. Cummings Quotes

163 Sourced Quotes

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel …
the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
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
Lessons hide in his wrinkles. Bells ding in the oldness of eyes. Did he by, any chance, tell children that there are such monstrous things as peace and goodwill...a corrupter of youth no doubt...

E. E. Cummings
Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: - you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.

E. E. Cummings
There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort— things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them— are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb; an IS.

E. E. Cummings
Seeker of truth
follow no path
all paths lead where
truth is here

E. E. Cummings
When god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began

E. E. Cummings
Nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we are not poets.

E. E. Cummings
Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most people?

E. E. Cummings
Always it's Spring)and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves.

E. E. Cummings
So, when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks tock don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me.

E. E. Cummings
And the coolness of your smile is stirringofbirds between my arms

E. E. Cummings
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often
has the naughty thumb of science prodded
thy
beauty
thou answereth them only with
spring.

E. E. Cummings
A man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

E. E. Cummings
Very luckily for you and me, the uncivilized sun mysteriously shines on "good" and "bad" alike. He is an artist.

E. E. Cummings
Now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened

E. E. Cummings
Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands -excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems

E. E. Cummings
They flock and they flee through the thunder of seem
though the stars in their silence
say Be.

E. E. Cummings
How should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

E. E. Cummings
-Before leaving my room i turn, and (stooping through the morning) kiss this pillow, dear where our heads lived and were.

E. E. Cummings
True lovers in each happening of their hearts
live longer than all which and every who;

E. E. Cummings
Blossoming are people…
all the earth has turned to sky
…and i am you are i am we

E. E. Cummings
Your slightest look easily will unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers, you open petal by petal myself a Spring opens her first rose.

E. E. Cummings
Without any doubt he was
whatever (first and last) most people fear most:
a mystery for which iv'e
no word except alive

E. E. Cummings
What if a much of which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry.

E. E. Cummings
A salesman is an it that stinks to please but whether to please itself or someone else makes no more difference than if it sells hate condoms education snakeoil vac uumcleaners terror strawberries democ ra(caveat emptor)cy superfluous hair

E. E. Cummings
Love is a place & through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places yes is a world & in this world of yes live (skillfully curled) all worlds

E. E. Cummings
They work and they pray
and they bow to a must
though the earth in her splendor
says May

E. E. Cummings
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

E. E. Cummings
Somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence.

E. E. Cummings
Dreamtree, truthtree tree of jubilee: with aeons of (trivial merely)existence, all when may not measure a now of your treasure

E. E. Cummings