"Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?"
— Jack Spicer

"I've often lost myself,
in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake"
— Federico García Lorca

"Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party."
— William Butler Yeats

"so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor)

""Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.""
— Pablo Neruda

"grammar in learning is like tyranny in government - confound the bitch I'll never be her slave."
— John Clare

"No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation"
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"And we forget because we must and not because we will."
— Matthew Arnold

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."
— Matthew Arnold

"It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation."
— Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre)

"Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied."
— Octavio Paz

"a silent concave of puppet buffoons
neither eagles nor jaguars
buzzard lawyers
locuses
wings of ink sawing mindibles
ventriloquist coyotes
peddlers of shadows
beneficent satraps
the cacomistle thief of hens
the monument to the Rattle and its snake
the altar to the mauser and the machete
the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman
rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement"
— Octavio Paz

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet/the Possibility of Being)

"How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Whoever you are, in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for a defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"How I will cherish you then,
you grief-torn nights!
Had I only received you,
inconsolable sisters,
on more abject knees, only
buried myself with more
abandon
in your loosened hair. How we waste
our afflictions!
We study them, stare out beyond them
into bleak continuance,
hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas
they're really
our wintering foliage, our dark greens
of meaning, one
of the seasons of the clandestine
year -- ; not only
a season --: they're site, settlement,
shelter, soil, abode."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

".... there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along...."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the move they give, the more they possess."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Mirrors should reflect before sending an image."
— Jean-Luc Godard

"The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
"
— Wisława Szymborska (View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems)

"The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold."
— Wisława Szymborska

"… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder."
— Yannis Ritsos (The Fourth Dimension)

"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
— Mary Oliver

"Lovers alone wear sunlight."
— e.e. cummings

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."
— Charles Baudelaire