V.S. > V.S.'s Quotes

“We must dream our way.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.”
― e.e. cummings, 100 Selected Poems

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.”
― e.e. cummings

“Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.”
― Eve Ensler

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding”
― Saul Williams, , said the shotgun to the head.

“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”
― William Blake

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

“We are asleep with compasses in our hands. ”
― W.S. Merwin

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things, does the heart find its morning and is refreshed.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“The universe is unraveling. It still is. We won the day. We won the battle. We won whatever unit of measurement you care to say that we won. We returned to the dangerous equilibrium we had before, which we can only assume, or hope, or wish is better. But, of course, we did not stop the unraveling of the universe. The universe is not a thing that is, it is not a thing at all. It is the very action of its going. It is, in fact, its own dissolves and our lives – the entire span of human existence going back and back and, if we are lucky, forward and forward – the entire span is spent within this dissolve.

So look at the fleeting stars with fleeting eyes, and feel how the earth beneath you gives. It is all a temporary manifestation of particles, and it is all unraveling back to particulate silence. The bustle of the human day will come and will go. And then there will be night.

But how beautiful these moments within the dissolve! What a temporary perfection we can find within this passing world! Everything good ever done! Everything good that was done today, and all the good people doing it, and back and back and forward and forward, all of that beauty within a universe unraveling.

Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet it is. How unlikely! How fantastic! And stupid. And excellent”
― Joseph Fink

“I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.”
― Hermann Hesse

“I don't want a religion that I put away with my Sunday clothes, and don't take out till the day comes around again; I want something to see and feel and live day by day.”
― Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl

“The Way to do is to be.”
― Lao Tzu

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
― Raymond Carver

“No Matter What

No matter what the world claims,
its wisdom always growing, so it’s said,
some things don’t alter with time:
the first kiss is a good example,
and the flighty sweetness of rhyme.

No matter what the world preaches
spring unfolds in its appointed time,
the violets open and the roses,
snow in its hour builds its shining curves,
there’s the laughter of children at play,
and the wholesome sweetness of rhyme.

No matter what the world does,
some things don’t alter with time.
The first kiss, the first death.
The sorrowful sweetness of rhyme.”
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses

“ANGELS You might see an angel anytime and anywhere. Of course you have to open your eyes to a kind of second level, but it’s not really hard. The whole business of what’s reality and what isn’t has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don’t care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty. For myself, but not for other people. That’s a place you just can’t get into, not entirely anyway, other people’s heads. I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance.”
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses: Poems