May Sarton - People Quotes

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All great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

May Sarton
It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other — there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

May Sarton
The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets.... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?

May Sarton
How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

May Sarton
People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.

May Sarton
I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

May Sarton
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

May Sarton
I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become.... But there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

May Sarton
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.

May Sarton
The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's — other nations' — experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

May Sarton
It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss between people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.

May Sarton
One must always get away to taste experience. One must always escape from people one loves in order to love them. Isn't it queer?

May Sarton
Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

May Sarton
When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

May Sarton
The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.

May Sarton
It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

May Sarton