Poems List

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side.

Each time someone stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

To know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

Blessed be childhood which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.

It is time, it is high time... Yes, but to do what?

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

The time is always right to do what is right.

Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.

If any choose to maintain, as many do, that species were gradually brought to their maturity from humbler forms ... he is welcome to his hypothesis, but I have nothing to do with it.

We must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present. Thus it is that foresight, the greatest blessing humanity has been given, is transformed into a curse.

We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a great distance, not by virtue of any sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Maturity comes not with age but with the acceptance of responsibility. You are only young once but immaturity can last a lifetime!

Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection-for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is (merely) to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate. I think it is above all to matter, to count, to stand for something. To have it make some difference that you lived at all.

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.