Ella Wheeler Wilcox

No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For this sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

You never can tell when you do an act
Just what the result will be;
But with every deed you are sowing a seed,
Though the harvest you may not see.

I see more light than darkness in the world…

I detect more good than evil in humanity.
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes,
And men grow better as the world grows old.

Unless the humblest creatures on the earth
Are bettered by thy loving sympathy
Think not to find a Paradise beyond.

Look in; and learn the wrong, and right,
From your own soul's unwritten laws.
And when you question, or demur,
Let Love be your Interpreter.

And if pretension for a time deceive,
And prove me one too ready to believe,
Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act,
I brand as lie, some great colossal Fact.

Anne Sexton

To love another is something
like prayer and it can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

I imitate
a memory of belief
that I do not own.

You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.

Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.

Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.

Earth, earth
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.

John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

Though Truth and Falsehood be
Near twins, yet Truth a little elder is.

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

I have done one braver thing
Than all the Worthies did;
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is to keep that hid.

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Doris Lessing

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common ... this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties.

They were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die — art will remain.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live.

But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.

My jests do not prevent me from thinking at times that in truth there is only one deity, eternal, creative, all-powerful, Venus Genetrix. She brings souls together; she unites bodies and things.

Eros called the world out of chaos. Whether he did well is another question; but, since he did so, we should recognize his might...

One may not believe in our gods, but it is possible to love them...

I know that even the meanest person has still at his disposition high-sounding words wherewith to mask his real character.

The greatest genius assimilates unconsciously the best with which it comes in contact, and by a subtle chemistry of its own makes new combinations.

I  love her now beyond all words; she sees it, — she reads it in my eyes, and in my whole manner towards her.

There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.

Whoso loves beauty is unable for that very reason to love deformity.

Colette

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

We only do well the things we like doing.

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave

If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.

Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

Nikos Kazantzakis

I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.

My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.

All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present...

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.

With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind.

I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me.

Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things.

This is the moment of greatest crisis. This is the signal for the March to begin. If you do not hear this Cry tearing at your entrails, do not set out.

Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.

Maxim Gorky

Your books and maps are of no use if there's no land of righteousness.

Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man — Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?

Yes, a human being can teach another one kindness — very simply!

Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.

Prison teaches no good — and Siberia doesn't either — but another human being can . . . yes, a human being can teach another one kindness — very simply!

There's a little book I'm thinking of writing — "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying.

Some one has to be kind, girl — some one has to pity people! Christ pitied everybody — and he said to us: "Go and do likewise!" I tell you — if you pity a man when he most needs it, good comes of it. 

There — you say — truth! Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.

One has to be able to count, if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.

It is quiet and peaceful here, the air is good, there are numerous gardens, and in them nightingales sing and spies lurk under the bushes.

Yasunari Kawabata

That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music.

A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary. [Go]

The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon; and it is this of which the poet sings.

How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint.

Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in "the discarding of words", it lies "outside words".

My own works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West. The spiritual foundation would seem to be quite different...

Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the "clear heart" of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light.