Quotes to inspire and reflect

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark. 1

Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.

Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well.

We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind.

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections, the escapades of death, Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.

The President ordains the bee to be Immortal.

Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

And still the grossest iridescence of ocean Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.

The death of one god is the death of all.

It is the celestial ennui of apartments That sends us back to the first idea.

The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.

By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that defeats and dreams The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament. It is a world of words to the end of it, In which nothing solid is its solid self.

And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

It was the last nostalgia: that he Should understand.

He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own… The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths, One’s tootings at the weddings of the soul Occur as they occur.

A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.

Is the lion that comes down to drink.

I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Beauty is momentary in the mind— The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death’s ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.

Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Green crammers of the green fruits of the world.

The plum survives its poems.

And as he came he saw that it was spring, A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum.

The natives of the rain are rainy men.

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.

The book of moonlight is not written yet.

The people know the salt of the sea and the strength of the winds lashing the corners of the earth. The people take the earth as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope. Who else speaks for the Family of Man?