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Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.
----Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
---Emily Dickinson
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Forever is composed of nows.
Emily Dickinson
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Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
---Emily Dickinson
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Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.
Emily Dickinson
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I love reading another reader’s list of favorites. Even when I find I do not share their tastes or predilections, I am provoked to compare, contrast, and contradict. It is a most healthy exercise, and one altogether fruitful.
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A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King.
---Emily Dickinson
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For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
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This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.
T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
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For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
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This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me.
Emily Dickinson
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Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood
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If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
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His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
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For you know only a heap of broken images
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot
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My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
----William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
T.S. Eliot
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I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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I can connect
Nothing with nothing
T.S. Eliot
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
----William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
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Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood
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He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
----T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
---William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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Datta, dayadhvam, damyata
(Give, sympathize, control)
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
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People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T.S. Eliot
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There is no method but to be very intelligent.
T. S. Eliot
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A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips.
----Alfred Lord Tennyson
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And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations
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It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.
T.S. Eliot
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Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
T.S. Eliot
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Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.
---William Butler Yeats
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I grow old … I grow old …I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems
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I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.
T.S. Eliot
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The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
---W.B. Yeats
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A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
T. S. Eliot
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Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it
T.S. Eliot
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Knowledge is Life with wings.
---William Blake
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Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
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Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays:
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I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man...
---William Wordsworth
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time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
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I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
----William Wordsworth
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I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
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As in plain terms (yet cunningly) he crav'd it; / Love always makes those eloquent that have it (II.71-2).
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.
T. S Eliot
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life is first boredom, then fear.
whether or not we use it, it goes,
and leaves what something hidden from us chose,
and age, and then the only end of age.
---Philip Larkin
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The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence
can never retract.
by this, and only this, we have existed.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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Live still, my love, and so conserve my life,
Or, dying, be the author of my death.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great Part II
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The journey not the arrival matters.
T.S. Eliot
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Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
----Philip Larkin
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And indeed there will be time to wonder, 'Do I dare?', and 'Do I dare?
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Is not all the power on Earth bestowed on us {the Pope}, even if we wanted to, can do no wrong?
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
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Truth I pursued,as Fancy sketch'd the way,
And wiser men than I went worse astray.
----Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Forbid me not to weep; he was my father;
And, had you lov'd him half so well as I,
You could not bear his death thus patiently.
Christopher Marlowe
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Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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Thus Time, and all-states-ordering Ceremony
Had banished all offense: Time’s golden thigh
Upholds the flowery body of the earth
In sacred harmony, and every birth
Of men and actions makes legitimate,
Being used aright. The use of time is Fate.
---From “Hero and Leander, Sestiad III
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You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
----Maya Angelou
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A reaching thought will search his deepest wits,
And cast with cunning for the time to come;
For evils are apt to happen every day.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
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For you, in my respect, are all the world.
Then how can it be said I am alone
When all the world is here to look on me?
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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SOME
'fools that will laugh on earth, must weep in hell'
act V scene ii
Marlowe Christopher
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I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils
----by William Wordsworth
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Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.
---Pablo Neruda
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I can't believe Joe Koch is complaining about the Goodreads Quote system
Christopher Marlowe, The Spell of the Open Air
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No; cowards and faint-hearted runaways
Look for orations when the foe is near:
Our swords shall play the orators for us.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great
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Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.
----Percy Bysshe Shelley: Prometheus Unbound
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fools that will laugh on earth, must weep in hell
--Marlowe Christopher, Fausto: Drama
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I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
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It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
Christopher Marlowe, Hero & Leander
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To err is human; to forgive, divine.
---- Alexander Pope
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Time passeth swift away;
Our life is frail, and we may die to-day.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great
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If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
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For whilst I live, here lives my soul's sole hope,
And when I die, here shall my spirit walk.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
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Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
Rock them, rock them, lullaby …
Thomas Dekker
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A diamond set in lead his worth retains.
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!
William Shakespeare, King Lear
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Our swords shall play the orators for us.
Christopher Marlowe
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
---John Milton
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Something still buzzeth in mine ears
And tells me if I sleep I never wake;
This fear is that which makes me tremble thus.
Christopher Marlowe, Edward II
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O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t'untie.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
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The god thou serv'st is thine own appetite
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
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As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
----Anne Sexton
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To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.
----Pablo Neruda
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More of your conversation would infect my brain.
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
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Time travels at different speeds for different people. I can tell you who time strolls for, who it trots for, who it gallops for, and who it stops cold for.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.
----J.R.R. Tolkien
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Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two
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Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.
William Shakespeare, King Lear
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What's done, is done
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
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The Albatross by Baudelaire
The Poet is like the prince of the clouds,
Haunting the tempest and laughing at the archer;
Exiled on earth amonst the shouting people,
His giant's wings hinder him from walking.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
-----Robert Browning, Men and Women
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A perfect Woman; nobly plann'd, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light.
----William Wordsworth
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There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
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I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees...........
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
------Ulysses
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
---+William Yeats
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The prince of darkness is a gentleman!
William Shakespeare, King Lear
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Being Poetic