"The proof of any art's lasting value is a comprehensive emotional necessity: it's something that a person needed to do and which awakens and satisfies corresponding needs in us." - Peter Schjeldahl
~
"Poetry is not at all what it’s often said to be, the indulgence, development, and expression of private inward life. This is one of those half-truths that is the worst error, even a lie. Poetry is inward self-development plus the insistence that this must have a principal place in the public forum plus a third thing, a conclusion that flows from the first two. Everyone must be allowed full personal development, and everyone must be allowed full participation, since only full participation leads to full personal development, and in turn a proper society can only be produced by full development of each member."
- A. F. Moritz
"Wonder is our need today, not information." - Elia Kazan
"I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry." - John Ashbery
"Let's not forget that small emotions are the great captains of our lives." - Vincent van Gogh
"I'm no more intelligent than the next guy. I'm just more curious." - Albert Einstein
"He has found his future who has found Shakespeare." - Emily Dickinson
"He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest." - Dylan Thomas
“We can distinguish between the dead fact and the creative fact, the fact that suggests and engenders.” - Virginia Woolf
"Give a man a mask and he will tell the truth." - Oscar Wilde
“In the artist of all kinds, one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.” - D. W. Winnicott
"We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don't know." - W.H. Auden
"In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
- Gustave Flaubert
"It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur." - Wallace Stevens
"One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment." - Marianne Moore
"Meaning in life comes not from what you take, but from what you give." - Simon Jacobson
"To be authentic, a work of art must exhibit two contradictory qualities, the quality of always-ness and the quality of now-ness." - W.H. Auden
"Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff and bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky." - Guillaume Apollinaire
"Perhaps Orpheus turned around so he could see Eurydice vanish, so that his desire would be endless and endless source to song." - Dean Young
"How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not." - John Keats
"I never left [Marianne Moore] without feeling happier: uplifted...inspired, determined to be good, to work harder, not to worry about what other people thought, never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it, no matter how many years it took—or never to publish at all." - Elizabeth Bishop
"This rose became a bandanna, which became a house, which became infused with all passion, which became a hideaway, which became yes I would like to have dinner, which became hands, which became lands, shores, beaches, natives on the stones, staring and wild beasts in the trees, chasing the hats of lost hunters, and all this deserves a tone." - Kenneth Koch
"The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake."
- Haruki Murakami
"I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have." - Leonardo da Vinci
"It must resist the intelligence almost successfully." - Wallace Stevens
"It could even be sustained that mediocrity in the civic sphere was an important condition of Dante's eminence in the artistic." - Samuel Beckett
"Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential. / There can be no denial, no repression of true personality, or else the creation will be false - the performer will be alienated from his or her intuitive voice." - Josh Waitzkin
"If I don’t write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream." - J. G. Ballard
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
"All things participate in an orgiastic potentiality that is collaborative and transformational. Oh, happy grocery list!" - Dean Young
''The drive toward the formation of metaphor is the fundamental human drive.''
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The poem sustains its sonic composure in the face of an onslaught of inexplicable experience." - James Longenbach
In poetry, "the real world" is summoned into being by "rhythm, balance, pattern, images," through a style "that remembers many masters." ~ W.B. Yeats
"Things real - such as existences of the Sun Moon and Stars and passages of Shakespeare." - John Keats
"The only thing that separates the writer from others—and far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, as it redoubles the force of solitude, 'one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness'—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores, but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover." - Samuel Beckett
"The battle between austerity, distance, a refusal to play games, and the distraction of wit and the sound of words gave Beckett's work its power and its unpredictability."
- Colm Tóibín
"It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives." - Wallace Stevens
"We can hope then in regard to what constitutes the material and the manner of art, for a liberty of unimaginable opulence." - Guillaume Apollinaire
"To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it." - Wallace Stevens
"Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do." - Samuel Coleridge
De Kooning's endless rebellion against artistic stasis and his drive to make every canvas "a storm of emergencies".
"The form is always the measure of the obsession." - Alberto Giacometti
"I'd rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar."
- Frank O'Hara
"We judge writers either as teachers, story tellers, or enchanters, but it is the enchanter who outlasts time." - Vladimir Nabokov
"When the aim of the work is spiritual insight, it seems absurd to expect fluency."
- Louise Glück
"The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person."
- Czesław Miłosz
"I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me." - Henri Matisse
"To see is perhaps never quite the sorcery that it is to surmise, though the obligation to enchantment is always binding." - Emily Dickinson
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - Cyril Connolly
"Work is a release from the longings of our dreams, which often only blind us and flatter us to death." - Franz Kafka
"Contradiction is the lever of transcendence." - Simone Weil
“The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.” - Anne Carson
"I don't want to go around pretending to be me." - Philip Larkin
“The senses paint by metaphor.” - Wallace Stevens
“Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.” - Louise Glück
"Art represents a self which is either insufficiently present or feels itself as not presentable." - Geoffrey Hartman
"It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief." - Lionel Trilling
“Nietzsche calls the modern world an ass that says yes to everything.” - Anne Carson
“There is no approach to art; it is a seizing.” - Marina Tsvetayeva
“Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.” - Leonardo da Vinci
“Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.” - Albert Camus
“I forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
- Marcel Duchamp
“Why would we read at all if we did not seek the blessing of more life into a time without boundaries?” - Harold Bloom
“Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.” - Edmond Jabès
"Listen very carefully to the first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that the reviewers don’t like; it may be the only thing in your work that is original and worthwhile." - Jean Cocteau
“The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.” - Krzysztof Kieślowski
“A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.” - Wallace Stevens
“The more I work the more I see things differently; everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown.” - Alberto Giacometti
“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye—is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination . . . great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.” - Abraham Lincoln
“Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics.” - Anna Swir
“A new music is a new mind.” - William Carlos Williams
“Poetry is words: and words, above everything else, are in poetry, sounds.”
- Wallace Stevens
“We wanted to make a film about yearning for art, for love, for closeness.”
- Krzysztof Piesiewicz
“Mastery, or even endurance, depends on the habitual exercise of the elemental.”
- Marie Ponsot
“Reading is a gymnast's act.” - Walt Whitman
“All arts create symbols for a level of reality which cannot be reached in any other way.”
- Paul Tillich
“I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself.” - Søren Kierkegaard
“The world has meaning from the moment adoration is produced in this world, when a finite being stands before something which goes beyond him.” - Emmanuel Levinas
“There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.” - Franz Kafka
“What I don't like about America is the pursuit of empty-talk, combined with a very high degree of self-satisfaction.” - Krzysztof Kieślowski
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” - Simone Weil
“I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things.” - Samuel Beckett
“The age of quantitative values gives way to a diffuse desire for the qualitative.”
- Michel Maffesoli
“Leaves spatter dawn from emerald cloud-sprockets.” - Hart Crane
“A book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience, and nothing else.”
- Boris Pasternak
“For a long time nothing, and suddenly one has the right eyes.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” - Julia Child
“Poetry is the least solitary of enterprises.” - Allen Grossman
“Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.” - Ian McEwan
"I’m going to remain a virgin so that I taste better when God decides to eat me." - Paul Legault (a "translation" of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems)
"Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled." - Mohammed
"Success is about the worst thing that can happen. I've lived too hard a life to die for it, or to lose the power to work." - Vincent van Gogh
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"I start every bit of research with a euphoria of ignorance." - Carlo Ginzburg
"I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
- Blaise Pascal
"In poetry, you become infinitely small without disappearing." - Roberto Bolaño
Professor Wolfgang Pauli: "You probably think these ideas are crazy." Student Niels Bohr: "I do. Unfortunately they are not crazy enough."
"The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything." - Walt Whitman
"Being influenced has always felt more than anything like being given permission, or being shown possibilities." - Christina Mengert
"In all love there resides an outlaw principle, an irrepressible sense of delinquency, contempt for prohibitions and a taste for havoc." - Louis Aragon
"The poetic act changes with the amount of background reality embraced by the poet's consciousness." - Czesław Miłosz
"All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one." - Walter Benjamin
“The poem is a nature created by the poet.” - Wallace Stevens
“Play must never be bewitched by mastery. Ask the lonely child.” - Donald Revell
“Poets, your brain's in your body.” - Glyn Maxwell
“The appearance of a system conveys a commodification of the imagination.” - Dean Young
“The seriously disturbed patient is the one who can be most profoundly influenced, his need being the greatest.” - Lou Andreas-Salomé
“Every proper artist is more or less a realist according to his own eyes.” - Émile Zola
“Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.” - Tour guide at the National Gallery
“When we are not sure, we are alive.” - Graham Greene
“The poem and the form often arrive together, holding hands.” - Paul Violi
“The trouble with a child's not being ‘crazy’ is that he will instead be conventional.”
- Kenneth Koch
"If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial." - Michel de Montaigne
"I like the cold weather. It means you get work done." - Noam Chomsky
"Most people understand someone wanting to be an artist, a musician, and even a novelist, but calling oneself a poet is regarded as weird and downright laughable."
- Charles Simic
“It is the intimacy of poetry that makes our art such a beautiful recourse from the disgrace and manipulations of public speech of empty rhetoric.” - Donald Revell
“Poetry’s greatest task is not to solidify groups or get the right people elected or moralize or broadcast; it is to foster a necessary privacy in which the imagination can flourish.”
- Dean Young
“All happiness depends on having the energy to assume the mask of some other self, that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth.” - W.B. Yeats
"It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time."
- Frank O'Hara
“It's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.” - Friedrich Schlegel
“Matisse, [who seems] bottomless in the amount of pleasure-gazing [he] could accommodate and reciprocate.” - Tony Hoagland
“Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.” - Louise Glück
“The most beautiful experience we can have, is the mysterious - it is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” - Albert Einstein
“It’s like being alive twice.” - A student of Basho’s on lyric poetry
“Poetry increases the feeling for reality.” - Wallace Stevens
“Man is only fully a human being when he plays.” - Friedrich Schiller
“Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.” - Paul Valéry
“There is another thing as noisy as pain, namely pleasure.” - Marcel Proust
“How far is truth susceptible of embodiment? That is the question, that is the experiment.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“The supreme virtue here is humility, for the humble are they who move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts.” - Wallace Stevens
“The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.” - Oscar Wilde
"Since I was a child my greatest happiness and pleasure have been to be able to do something for others." - Ludwig Beethoven
"Play for mortal stakes." - Robert Frost
"Of things that would never be quite expressed, / Where you yourself were not quite yourself, / And did not want nor have to be" -Wallace Stevens
"I never was interested in how to make a good painting, but to see how far one can go."
- Willem de Kooning
"Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance." ~ Robert Thurman
"The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Every time we look at the work of a genius, we feel like we are catapulted into a perpetual present tense of existence." - Vincent Desiderio
"The wind gives me / fallen leaves enough / to make a fire" - Issa
"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity."
- Anne Truitt
"When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink / Into the compass and curriculum, / Of introspective exiles, lecturing." - Wallace Stevens
“My identifying features / are rapture and despair.” - Wisława Szymborska
"Man is only fully a human being when he plays." - Friedrich Schiller
"The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates." - Hélène Cixous
"Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be." - James Wolcott
"I have steadfastly avoided talks, lectures, etc., because they tend to formalize my own thinking, which I think would not be a good thing." - Stanley Kubrick
"Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it." - Emily Dickinson
"One is often drawn to the best writers because one has a sense that one's life might depend on them." - Junot Díaz
"Style is the transformation the writer imposes on reality." - Marcel Proust
"Tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy." - Harriet Monroe to Hart Crane
"When the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Poetry as manifestation of the relationship that man creates between himself and reality." - Wallace Stevens
"Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly."
- Carl Sandburg
"Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime." - Immanuel Kant
"The most genuine, authentic, poem is the result of a consciousness articulating itself as only that particular consciousness can." - Carl Phillips
"We’ve got too many priests and not enough jesters." - Evgeny Morozov
"My desire to make poems and stories was as intense as any adultery." - Elaine Feinstein
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Like Dante's Beatrice or de Kooning's Woman I, the optic can have it all at once...like any good art, it teaches you to linger." - Vanessa Place
"Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words!" - Hart Crane
"Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear." - Sappho
"Submission, deepest submission to your fate, only this can give you the sacrifices - for this matter of service." - Ludwig Beethoven
"When [art] pushes its aspirations to the brink of total collapse but remains intact - then it will find its subject." - Vincent Desiderio
"All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman." - W.H. Auden
"Where you are tender, you speak your plural." - Roland Barthes
"Bach’s music sets in order what life cannot." - Otto Bettmann
"It is not necessary for you to complete the work; neither are you free to desist from it."
- Rabbi Tarfon
"The seriously disturbed patient is the one who can be most profoundly influenced, his need being the greatest." - Lou Andreas-Salomé
"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self." - Albert Einstein
"What's signaled by the black shapes is a human presence." - Glyn Maxwell
"How far into the depths must I reach in order to grasp that which seems at hand?"
- John Keats
"We write to taste life twice." - Anais Nin
"It is the very one who writes down his dream who is obliged to be extremely wide awake." - Paul Valéry
"Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal." - Wallace Stevens
"Art's greatness consists in allowing that to be uttered which ideology covers up."
- Theodor Adorno
"Linguistic dispossession is close to the dispossession of one's self." - Eva Hoffman
"That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth." - Friedrich Nietzsche (on Montaigne)
"God of Song, / Thou bearest me along / Through sights I scarce can bear" - John Keats
"The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it." - Jean Paul Sartre
"Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language." - Marcel Proust
"There, nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters." - Philip Roth (from a trip to Communist-controlled Prague)
"Emily Dickinson's poems are a triumph of tone, which is the same thing as a triumph of imagination." - Denis Donoghue
"It is the huge, high harmony that sounds / A little and a little, suddenly, / By means of a separate sense." - Wallace Stevens
"Because I don’t know where a poem is headed when I start, it seems that revelation has to play a central part in the poems, that what I’m most consistently doing is trying to understand why something is on my mind…maybe writing is nothing more than an inquiry into presences." - Bob Hicok
"The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, / The passion that left the ground to lose itself in sky" - Robert Browning
"They thought it queer I didn't rise. I thought a lie would be queerer." - Emily Dickinson
"The poems I have loved the most are those I have understood the least." - T.S. Eliot
"All I care a cent for is to catch sentence tones that haven’t been brought to book."
- Robert Frost
"A shilling life will give you all the facts." - W.H. Auden
"It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension / To life, when life is precisely that dimension." - John Ashbery
"I think it's a kind of horror for my generation that our private lives have been programmed by Hollywood." - Karen Volkman
"There is no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion." - Edgar Allen Poe
"One wound is enough to feed the open wounds of the sky." - Edmond Jabès
"The voice of the solitary / Who makes others less alone" - Stanley Kunitz
"The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union." - Julia Cameron
"We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative." - Barbara Hardy
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." - Francis Bacon
"Better a private dreamworld [in art], it seems to me, than a glib facsimile of the common good, better Miró than Léger, or Matisse than Piscator, or Kahlo than Rivera, or De Chirico than De Stijl." - T.J. Clark
"Quietism is what distinguishes the New York School from every other American avant-garde: the panache of piety." - Donald Revell
"Theory is good but it doesn’t prevent things from existing." - Anne Carson
"I love your development / From the answer to a simple query to a state of peace /
That has the world by the throat." - Kenneth Koch, from "To Yes"
"An attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being...freely, fully and truly on record." - Walt Whitman, on Leaves of Grass
"When Shakespeare wrote 'Two loves I have,' reader, he was not kidding." - John Berryman
"A poet is haunted by a voice with which words must be harmonized." - André Malraux
"I am only interested in adding what seems to me something really new to what has been written." - Hart Crane
"Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words." - Virginia Woolf
"Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, / cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed." - Dean Young
"Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake." - Anne Carson
"Note the elite capitalist assumption in critiquing cultural elitism, especially literary elitism, which is sans profit." - Vanessa Place
"Poetry must drag further into the clean nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes than Freud could realize." - Dylan Thomas
"how does a sequence continue to startle its way through clouds" - Rusty Morrison
"Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms." - Ben Lerner
"poetry dissolves in / brilliant moisture and reads us / to us" - John Ashbery
"We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written." - Tristan Tzara
"Through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane." - Friedrich Schiller
"The exile was when they reached for the fruit." - Unknown
"The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring."
- James Joyce
"When we find in poetry that which gives us a momentary existence on an exquisite plane, is it necessary to ask the meaning of a poem?" - Wallace Stevens
"A good reader does not know where she is going. A perfect reader does not know where she came from." - Mark Yakich
"The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything." - Walt Whitman
"Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are." - José Ortega y Gasset
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
"At the very bottom of devoutness, there lurks the capricious arbitrariness that knows itself has produced the god." - Søren Kierkegaard
"The only legitimate use of privilege is to try and dismantle the inequalities and unfairnesses of privilege." - Rebecca Solnit
"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist." - Leo Tolstoy
"There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things, which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently."
- Virginia Woolf
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers." - Thomas Pynchon
"Faith is the experience of the intelligence illuminated by love." - Simone Weil
"The materialist view of life can’t account for our darkest or highest moments." - Leon Wieseltier
"Your duty is to work with human beings as human beings, not because you think they are angels." - Nelson Mandela
"What is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, like pity, moral outrage, and fear."
- Joan Halifax
"Love, something crazy comes to mind: I can't bear living on my best behavior." - Louise Labé
"A consciousness elaborating and dismissing its own inventions." - J.M. Coetzee on Beckett
"My proposal is very concrete: we have to set up a kind of parliament to practice listening to the suffering of America." - Thich Nhat Hanh
"Psychoanalysis is essentially a cure through love." - Sigmund Freud
"Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient." - Friedrich Schiller
"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears or the sea." - Isak Dinesen
"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life." - James Joyce
"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"My storyline just wore itself out. The less there was of me, the happier I got." - Leonard Cohen
"The role of a writer is not to say what we can say, but what we are unable to say."
- Anaïs Nin
"Poetry has more in common with worship than with philosophy or theology." - Helen Gardner
"It is funny about wars, they ought to be different, but they are not." - Gertrude Stein
"What we fear most is that we will be denied the opportunity to fulfill our true potential."
- Dan Pallotta
"There is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh which I do not find fascinating." - W. H. Auden
"Narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world." - Charlotte Brontë
"And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking." - Virginia Woolf
"There are two ways of disliking art. One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally."
- Oscar Wilde
"I suppose the work is to wound the cliché and see what it yields." - Rusty Morrison
"Voices I am following lead me to the margins." - Susan Howe
"An undertone of sweetest comradeship and human love, threading its steady thread inside the chaos." - Walt Whitman
"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." - Rumi
"I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."
- Aldous Huxley
"What's next for me? I am concerned with the governance of heaven, which is mostly silence. I take my current instruction from snow & sand, they are heavenly forms - substantial and effortless. May poems be so." - Donald Revell
"Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray." - Hart Crane
"Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun." - George Scialabba
"The prophecy of art is that the true self comes from afar." - Allen Grossman
"Ourself behind ourself, concealed – / Should startle most" - Emily Dickinson
"I don’t believe anything that anyone says. I look at them the way they are." - Jaggi Vasudev
"To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great." - Friedrich Hegel
"To find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry." - Emily Dickinson
"As one works more seriously, one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive passing thought." ~ Van Gogh
"You get lucky from time to time // Once, in a mad rush, / I painted a blizzard that / blew away my brush." - Rachel Wetzsteon
"If affluence comes, we will lose all our sense. This is what America is telling the rest of world." - Jaggi Vasudev
"Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea - / Past the houses, past the headlands, / Into deep Eternity." - Emily Dickinson
"Great poetry is in its essence foolish, it believes and it is this that constitutes its glory and its strength." - Charles Baudelaire
"Books live almost entirely because of their style." - William Butler Yeats
"My wife was very immature. Whenever I was in the bathtub she came and sank my little ships." - Woody Allen
"The temperament to which art appeals...is the temperament of receptivity. That is all."
- Oscar Wilde
"We are to have a tiny party here tonight; I hate tiny parties - they force one into constant exertion." - Jane Austen
"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought." - Simone Weil
"The qualities we admire in people - resourcefulness, intelligence, decisiveness, wit, the ability to bring others into the emotional substantive self - are often the same ones that we feel in art that holds our attention." - David Salle
"Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon." - Emily Dickinson
"The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes...not through extensity but through intensity." - Søren Kierkegaard
"Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, / cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed." - Dean Young
"We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made us." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Out of joy I became a fabulous opera." - Arthur Rimbaud
"An attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being...freely, fully and truly on record." - Walt Whitman, on Leaves of Grass
"If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees." - Rainer Maria Rilke
"I think it's a kind of horror for my generation that our private lives have been programmed by Hollywood." - Karen Volkman
"If you want to build a ship, don't assign people tasks & work, but teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." ~ Saint-Exupery
"The social and the ego are the two idols." - Simone Weil
"Since then the Moon has heard jackals cheeping in thyme desserts." - Arthur Rimbaud
"Emily Dickinson's poems are a triumph of tone, which is the same thing as a triumph of imagination." ~ Denis Donoghue
"People can sense the truth. Truth has an ontological superiority over lies." - Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
"There seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone." - Emily Dickinson
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