Quotes to inspire and reflect

If ever I said, in grief or pride, I tired of honest things, I lied.

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning;

I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.

I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year.

Death devours all lovely things; Lesbia with her sparrow Shares the darkness—presently Every bed is narrow.

We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light. 1

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,— No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat—the sky Will cave in on him by and by.

We, the rescued, Beg you: Show us your sun, but gradually. Lead us from star to star, step by step. Be gentle when you teach us to live again. 2

All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood.

A stranger always has his homeland in his arms like an orphan for which he may be seeking nothing but a grave. 1

O the chimneys On the ingeniously devised habitations of death When Israel’s body drifted as smoke Through the air— Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep, A star that turned black Or was it a ray of sun? 1

I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.

A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.

But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field. 1

You are eternity’s hostage A captive of time.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I must confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.

Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed… here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

The matters I relate Are true lies. 3

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.

That was a time when only the dead could smile.

To joyously savor one single instant of initial life I seek an innocent country 1

If you can’t give me love and peace, Then give me bitter fame.

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it! Genius? At this moment A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one, All their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.

The only freedom the gods grant us Of our own free will to their sovereignty. Since only in the illusion of freedom

Just when you think you’re on the point of release From loneliness, then loneliness swoops down upon you.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well 10 When the tongues of flame are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe. 9

Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing.

But fare forward, voyagers.

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver.

The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale’s backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices.

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.