Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.
But beauty is set apart, beauty is cast by the sea, a barren rock, beauty is set about with wrecks of ships.
For you are abstract, making no mistake, slurring no word in the rhythm you make, the poem, writ in the air.
...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?
The race may or may not be to the swift, but tell me, is it likely that the fight will be entrusted to the dead?
The Greeks have snatched up their spears. They have pointed the helms of their ships Toward the bulwarks of Troy.
We are voyagers, discoverers of the not-known, the unrecorded; we have no map; possibly we will reach haven, heaven.
Lift up our eyes to you? no, God, we stare and stare, upon a nearer thing that greets us here, Death, violent and near.
When you would think, "what was the use of it," you'll remember something you can't grasp and you'll wonder what it was.
Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.
In my garden the winds have beaten the ripe lilies; in my garden, the salt has wilted the first flakes of young narcissus.
We are these people, wistful, ironical, wilful, who have no part in new-world reconstruction, in the confederacy of labour.
Long hours trail in their purple and long years are lost in just this moment while our souls are near, our mouths separate.
Music sets up ladders, it makes us invisible, it sets us apart, it lets us escape; but from the visible there is no escape.
Could beauty be beaten out, O youth the cities have sent to strike at each other's strength, it is you who have kept her alight.
She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.
Thoth, Hermes, the stylus, the palette, the pen, the quill endure, though our books are a floor of smouldering ash under our feet.
No poetic phantasy but a biological reality, a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant or sea-plant cell; I live; I am alive.
The stallion and his mare, unbridled, with arrow-pattern, are worked on. the blue cloth before the door of religion and inspiration.
Cheat me not with time, with the dull ache of flesh, for all flesh turns, even the loveliest ankle and frail thigh, to bitterest dust.
Take what the old-church found in Mithra's tomb, candle and script and bell, take what the new-church spat upon and broke and shattered.
Alas, day, you brought light, You trailed splendour You showed us god: I salute you, most precious one, But I go to a new place, Another life.
Let Love step down, open the clasped hands, forfeit the thorny crown, retrieve the garment that was whole, body and spirit one, spirit and soul.
Love has no charm when Love is swept to earth: you'd make a lop-winged god, frozen and contrite, of god up-darting, winged for passionate flight.
Until it seems the whole city will be covered with gold pollen shaken from the bell-towers, lilies plundered with the weight of massive bees . . .
The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.
No man will be present in those mysteries, yet all men will kneel, no man will be potent, important, yet all men will feel what it is to be a woman.
Think of the moment you count most foul in your life; conjure it, supplicate, pray to it; your face is bleak, you retract, you dare not remember it.
That way of inspiration is always open, and open to everyone; it acts as go-between, interpreter, it explains symbols of the past in to-day's imagery.
I knew the poor, I knew the hideous death they die, when famine lays its bleak hand on the door; I knew the rich, sated with merriment, who yet are sad.
War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment; We, we alone, Nereids inviolate, Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant: Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.
O beautiful white land, olives and wild anemone and violet mingled among the shale, and purple wings of little winter-butterflies say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.
The laying of fish on the embers, the taste of the fish, the feel of the texture of bread, the round and the half-loaf, the grain of a petal, the rain-bow and the rain.
I myself have seen the floating ships And nothing will ever be the same The shouts, The harrowing voices within the house. I stand apart with an army: My mind is graven with ships.
remember the golden apple-trees; O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one, for they fall exhausted, numb, blind but in certain ecstasy, for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.
Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of terrible lava, pressure on heart, lungs, the brain about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!)
Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.
The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched, I bring thee as offering.