Rita Dove

I loved to read, but I always thought that
the dream was too far away. The person who
had written the book was a god, it wasn't
a person.

John Keats

Do you not see how necessary a world
of pains and troubles is to school
an intelligence and make it a soul?

Louis Dudek

There are two kinds of people; those who
are always well and those who are always
sick. Most of the evils of the world come
from the first sort and most of the
achievement from the second.

Elizabeth Bishop

The armored cars of dreams, contrived to
let us do so many a dangerous thing.

Edward R. Murrow

A satellite has no conscience.

Otis Rush

A guy will promise you the world and give
you nothin', and that's the blues.

J Allard

The chips are in production, the machines
aren't. So we've got a little bit of work
left to do.

Bertrand Russell

A hallucination is a fact, not an error;
what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Mose Allison

There's a lot of terrible things goin' on
all the time, but you gotta try and have
some fun in the end.

Roy Acuff

Don't be a blueprint. Be an original.

Neil Young

As you go through life, you've got to see
the valleys as well as the peaks.

Bryan Adams

I got in trouble with the police, and
that was a rude awakening. That was it.
I'd seen the bottom of the pit, and it
was time to scrape myself out of it.

Bob Dylan

A hero is someone who understands the
responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Andre Breton

If I place love above everything, it is because
for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing
state of affairs imaginable.

Frank O'Hara

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

Buddy Hackett

I've had a few arguments with people, but
I never carry a grudge. You know why? While
you're carrying a grudge, they're out dancing.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize
that they'd been kept in the dark by the United
States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

e.e. cummings

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up
you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Nikki Giovanni

I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens.
Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the
failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself
if I didn't try.

Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes.
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.

Edwin Arnold

Within yourself deliverance must be searched for,
because each man makes his own prison

Marquis de Lafayette

When the government violates the people's rights,
insurrection is, for the people and for each portion
of the people, the most sacred of the rights and
the most indispensible of duties.

Jorge Luis Borges

Nevertheless, it means much to have loved,
To have been happy, to have laid my hand on
The living Garden, even for one day.

Hart Crane

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so
overwhelms the present with its worth and vision
that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that
there exist any real links between that past
and a future worthy of it.

Eliza Cook

How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start,
When memory plays an old tune on the heart.

Irish Proverb

Laughter is brightest, in the place where the food is.

Arna Bontemps

Yet would we die as some have done,
beating a way for the rising sun.

Henry Constable

My lady's presence makes the roses red,
because to see her lips they blush for
shame.

Allen Ginsberg

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A man may devote himself to death and
destruction to save a nation; but no
nation will devote itself to death
and destruction to save mankind.

Dante Alighieri

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a
pupil imitates his master; thus your art must
be, as it were, God's grandchild.

Milton Babbit

The new limitations are the human ones of perception.

Bliss Carman

Indifference may not wreck a man's life at any one
turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot
in the long run.

Matthew Arnold

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Bob Leslie

An inch of time is an inch of gold but you can't
buy that inch of time with an inch of gold.

Francois Rabelais

Half the world does not know how the other half lives.

Violet Fane

Let me arise and open the gate,
to breathe the wild warm air of the heath,
And to let in Love, and to let out Hate,
And anger at living and scorn of Fate,
To let in Life, and to let out Death.

Lao Tzu

Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.

Lui Xiaobo

The (Chinese) government has already turned the
Nobel Peace Prize into a political storm that
we never imagined could be so big. It is not
only nationwide, but it has gone global

Robert Creeley

Don't name it, as they say, because instantly
you offer it to this peculiar authority

Keith Moon

I was a rust repairer. I was a rust repairer
and full-time survivor. I survived all the
major earthquakes, and the Titanic, and
several air crash.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Peace as a goal is an ideal which will not be
contested by any government or nation, not
even the most belligerent.

John Dryden

And love's the noblest frailty of the mind.

Jack Paar

Looking back, my life seems like one long obstacle
race, with me as the chief obstacle.

Robert Bly

It is surely a great calamity for a human
being to have no obsessions.

Dylan Thomas

Dylan talked copiously, then stopped.
'Somebody's boring me,' he said,
'I think it's me.'

Palden Gyatso

“This is a responsible act. We ask the
IOC to take the opportunity to push the Chinese
government to improve human rights.”

Bill Cosby

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I
did my best to rewrite them.

Kahlil Gibran

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer
than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far
more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to
one passing through the valley than to those who
inhabit the mountain?

Sean O'Casey

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately
unrehearsed.