Poems List

God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh.

No good water comes from a muddy spring. No sweet fruit comes from a bitter seed.

Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

He who would love much has also much to suffer.

People have declaimed against luxury for 2000 years, in verse and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

The world laughs at another man's pain.

When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.

Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.

Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars.

Really, to stop criticism, they say, one must die.

The sea, the sea is everything! Its sovereign mass brings to me atoms of a myriad faraway lands;Its bright smile animates me in the limpid mornings. And when at the end of day my faith has failed me, My heart echoes the sound of its sorrow in the sands! (Mi Retiro)

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

[George Bush] has raised taxes on the people driving pickup trucks and lowered taxes on the people riding in limousines. We can do better.

No one has a monopoly of the true God, nor is there a nation or religion that can claim, or at any rate prove, that it has been given the exclusive right to the Creator or sole knowledge of His Being.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals. Not just anyone, with any background, or any training, can do a fine job of programming. Programmers know this, but then why is it that they think that anyone picked off the street can do documentation? One has only to spend an hour looking at papers written by graduate students to realize the extent to which the ability to communicate is not universally held. And so, when we speak about computer program documentation, we are not speaking about the psychology of computer programming at all - except insofar as programmers have the illusion that anyone can do a good job of documentation, provided he is not smart enough to be a programmer.

Dinner theater is anti-culture.

People don't realize that victory is the child of struggle, that joy blossoms from suffering, and redemption is a product of sacrifice.

There has never been a perfect government, because men have passions and if they did not have passions, there would be no need for government.

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.