Poet Quotes

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

An old dissembler who lived out his lie
Lies here as if he did not fear to die.

J. V. Cunningham

There never has been a time when I did not fall in love with one or two in a single day.

Dafydd ap Gwilym

Pity for him who one day looks upon
his inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost.

I know everything, but I don't understand any of it.

"Who affirms that crystals are alive?" I affirm it, let who will deny: Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive, Wane and wither; I have seen them die.

Making art means not only using languages, but also creating new ones. To do this, new tools are indispensable. Even returning to more traditional languages such as linear poetry or narration, after being enriched by the experience of hypertext, hypermedia and multimedia, allows us to rethink the older forms of expression and transfer the lessons of the new media into even the more traditional modalities of language, such as narrative, for example.

Caterina Davinio

Real friendships among men are so rare that when they occur they are famous.

Speak no evil of women; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves respect; for of women do we not all come?

Pedro Calderón de la Barca

When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.

Walter de la Mare

Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains.

Alphonse de Lamartine

In principle, should the laborers have the produce of their labor? I do not hesitate to say: No! although I know that a multitude of workers will cry out. Look, proletarians, cry out, shout as much as you like, but then listen to me: No, it is not the product of their labors to which the workers have a right. It is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of those needs. To have the possession of the product of our labor is not to have possession of that which is proper to us, it is to have property in a product made by our hands, and which could be proper to others and not to us. And isn't all property theft?

Joseph Déjacque

Uncertain ways unsafest are, and doubt a greater mischief than despair.

Who will ride fiery, ahead of the legions,
Nag for a steed, and crusts for meal,
Temper his sword in the heat and in ice storms,
Sleep on straw pallets, labor 'til dawn,
Bring down the armies, the walls and the forts
With but a handful of stout Russian men?

Gavrila Derzhavin

The snail will get to Easter just as soon.

Eustache Deschamps

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

Whatsoever contradicts my sense,
I hate to see, and never can believe.

Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

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

The things I have
are nameless,
old and true;
they may not be named;
few may live and know.

It is richt facil and eith gait, I the tell,
Forto discend and pas on down to hell:
The blak gettis of Pluto, and that dirk way,
Standis evir oppin and patent nycht and day;
Bot tharfra to return agane on hyght,
And heir abufe recovir this aris licht,
That is difficil wark, thar lawbour lyis.

Who dreads to the dust returning?
Who shrinks from the sable shore,
Where the high and haughty yearning
Of the soul can sting no more?

Bartholomew Dowling

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine.

Yet I will look upon thy face again, My own romantic Bronx, and it will be A face more pleasant than the face of men. Thy waves are old companions, I shall see A well remembered form in each old tree And hear a voice long loved in thy wild minstrelsy.

Joseph Rodman Drake

It is your virtue, being men, to try;
And it is ours, by virtue to deny.

Michael Drayton