Poems List

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutalized his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion.

Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. Like beams in a house or bones to a body, so is order to all things.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.

How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.

What will not woman, gentle woman dare; when strong affection stirs her spirit up?

Affliction is not sent in vain, young man, from that good God, who chastens whom he loves.

I have told you of the Spaniard who always put on his spectacles when about to eat cherries, that they might look bigger and more attempting. In like manner I made the most of my enjoyment s: and through I do not cast my cares away, I pack them in as little compass as I can, and carry them as conveniently as I can for myself, and never let them annoy others.

Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme; to be sublimely great or to be nothing.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.