Poet Quotes

To this point is my mind reduced by your fault, Lesbia, and has so ruined itself by its own devotion, that now it can neither wish you well though you should become the best of women, nor cease to love you though you do the worst that can be done.

A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.

George McWhirter

Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican!
His beak holds more than his belican.
He takes in his beak
Enough food for a week.
But I'll be darned if I know how the helican.

Dixon Lanier Merritt

He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.

Of Samuel Johnson

The sweetest pleasures soonest cloy, And its best flavour temperance gives to joy.

Languages are not owned
by nations but by the people who use them
and make them live.

Abdourahman Waberi

By the power of eloquence old truth receives a new habit; though its essence be the same, yet its visage is so altered that it may currently pass and be accepted as a novelty.

Michael Wigglesworth

One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life Either about God's secrets or one's wife.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,—
Take, I give it willingly;
For, invisible to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me.

Thou that swing'st upon the waving haire Of some well-filled Oaten Beard, Drunke ev'ry night with a Delicious teare, Dropt thee from Heav'n, where now th'art! The joys of Earth and Ayre are thine intire, That with thy feet and wings dost hop and flye; And when thy Poppy workes, thou dost retire To thy carv'd Acorn-bed to lye.

Richard Lovelace

There is strength deep bedded in our hearts, of which we reck but little till the shafts of heaven have pierced its fragile dwelling. Must not earth be rent before her gems are found?

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins,
Hornell--
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was.

The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Denise Levertov

Ha! see where the wild-blazing Grog-shop appears,
As the red waves of wretchedness swell;
How it burns on the edge of tempestuous years—
The horrible Light-house of Hell!

McDonald Clarke

If I find it painful getting out of bed in the morning, I am likely to find it harder still in five years' time. Then you have to add that, though that is undoubtedly so, it is also quite possible that you won't be there in five years.

Whoever interrupts the conversation of others to make a display of his own fund of knowledge, makes notorious his own stock of ignorance.

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is.

The doctor looked wise: — "A slow fever," he said: Prescribed sudorifics, — and going to bed. "Sudorifics in bed," exclaim'd Will, "are humbugs! I've enough of them there, without paying for drugs!"

George Colman the Younger

I know I could enchain him with a smile:
And lead him captive with a gentle word,
I scorn my look should ever man beguile,
Or other speech, than meaning to afford.

Elizabeth Tanfield Cary

There are fools who seek to understand the secrets of nature.

The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that he on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those
Whom he to follow him hath chose.

When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.

Willard R. Espy