Poems List

Universal orthodoxy is enriched by every new discovery of truth: what at first appeared universal, by wishing to stand still, sooner or later becomes a sect.

Today as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle.

Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

What we share with another ceases to be our own.

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

I always resented the label of 'shock jock' that the press came up with for me. Because I never intentionally set out to shock anybody.

Writing a book just might be the hardest thing I've ever done, besides trying to get laid in college.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine, jiggling your knees blankly in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Style is what happens when simplicity is achieved.

One foot on Mount Olympus, the other in the kitty litter.