Ecstatic Poetry Quotes

Are you looking for me?
I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
you will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath. ~ Kabir

i can't hold onto love.
i'm not gentle enough.

i always end up
crushing the thing
in between my fingertips. ~ AVA.

Prague is far more than the sum of its physical parts or its history. It is a city of the mind and the imagination, a city that exists as vividly in poetry and painting and music and legend as it does in brick and stone... Just as the physical city of Prague would be unimaginable without its unique topography, without its palaces, its churches, its parks, its streets, and its hostelries, so the Prague of the mind would be unimaginable without its storytellers and the tales they weave. ~ Paul Wilson

Opportunity (from Machiavelli)

"But who art thou, with curious beauty graced,
O woman, stamped with some bright heavenly seal
Why go thy feet on wings, and in such haste?"

"I am that maid whose secret few may steal,
Called Opportunity. I hasten by
Because my feet are treading on a wheel,

Being more swift to run than birds to fly.
And rightly on my feet my wings I wear,
To blind the sight of those who track and spy;

Rightly in front I hold my scattered hair
To veil my face, and down my breast to fall,
Lest men should know my name when I am there;

And leave behind my back no wisp at all
For eager folk to clutch, what time I glide
So near, and turn, and pass beyond recall."

"Tell me; who is that Figure at thy side?"
"Penitence. Mark this well that by decree
Who lets me go must keep her for his bride.

And thou hast spent much time in talk with me
Busied with thoughts and fancies vainly grand,
Nor hast remarked, O fool, neither dost see
How lightly I have fled beneath thy hand. ~ James Elroy Flecker

Truth and effort may increase human worth
But they are not enough to make us whole;
Only love can complete us. ~ Ilchi Lee

Every particle of dust on a patch of earth
Was a sun-cheek or brow of the morning star;
Shake the dust off your sleeve carefully
That too was a delicate, fair face. ~ Omar Khayyam

What you gain here, you lose on the other side. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman. ~ Robert Graves

- so much like riding dangerous women
with whiskey coloured eyes -
such women as once fell dead with their lovers
with fire in their heads and slippery froth on thighs ~ Al Purdy

The still waters
Wrap my lips,
Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack. ~ Sylvia Plath

A bush-warbler,
Coming to the verandah-edge,
Left its droppings
On the rice-cakes. ~ Matsuo Basho

Shower the darkness with love
and watch light illuminate. ~ Melody Lee

I've always been told that
I was born chasing sunsets, but
sometimes I wonder if I'm really
just trying to find a way
to be in two places at once. ~ Wilder Poetry

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity!
People like Mr Bubentsov do not understand anything about art and are not very interested in it, but whenever they happen to come across talentless mediocrities they are pitiless and implacable, They are ready to forgive anyone, but not Makar, that eccentric loser with manuscripts lying in his trunk. The gardener damaged the old rubber plant, and ruined lots of expensive plants, and the general does nothing and goes on spending money like water; Mr Bubentsov only got down to work once a month when he was a magistrate, then stammered, muddled up the laws, and spoke a lot of rubbish, but all this is forgiven and not noticed; but there is no way that anyone can pass by the talentless Makar, who writes passable poetry and stories, without saying something offensive. No one cares that the general's sister-in-law slaps the maids' cheeks, and swears like a trooper when she is playing cards, that the priest's wife never pays up when she loses, and the landowner Flyugin stole a a dog from the landower Sivobrazov, but the fact that Our Province returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka.
If someone does not write the way required, they never ~ Anton Chekhov

When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what
did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed
a noun. ~ Gertrude Stein

The great Poetry that creates out of the soul of humankind is inaccurately explained if we reduce it to the personal ~ C. G. Jung

Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

We are far too used to the assumption that poetry and poets will be there when we want them, no matter how long they have been ignored, taken for granted, misused. After all, isn't poetry a form of prophecy, and aren't prophets known for their talent for flourishing in inhospitable deserts and other bleak surroundings? Maybe. But maybe not indefinitely. ~ Jan Clausen

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side. ~ Emily Bronte

From the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.
We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that. ~ Jay Woodman

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships. ~ Antonin Artaud

The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates. ~ H.L. Mencken

In the end,
Just remember
If he really want to stay with you,
He will pursue you.
That's it! ~ Jyoti Patel

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before. ~ Brandi L. Bates

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible. ~ Paul A.M. Dirac

The human species – mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone who hadn't had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn't just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can't last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Ecstasy ... When you increase your ability to create ecstasy out of those things found in everyday life, all of your ecstatic sensual experiences grow deeper. ~ Barabara Carrellas

Travellers

We study to travel in life.
We study to travel in the light.

There is a large space of love for us.
There is a large space of death in the night.

We are travellers from world to world.
We are travellers from dream to dream.

We need a simple thing.
We need a space of beginning.

All the emotions of our trip
are the emotions of different lives.

We remind the travellers as dreams
which were made of an incredible light. ~ Ekaterina Yakovina

Let's just sit quietly and listen to the secrets the rain wants to tell us. ~ John Mark Green

Let my words fall
On your skin
As the raindrops fall!
Feel my words
Touch your body and soul! ~ Avijeet Das

As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model. ~ Boris Pasternak

To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot. ~ Octavio Paz

We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we'll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything. ~ Clive Barker

Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things. ~ Frederick Buechner

One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about ~ May Sarton

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it. ~ Amy Lowell

Her religious poetry was surprisingly slender, and as I was eager to know more about her religion, I asked her about this aspect of her poetry. She replied with these lines from Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'
that is all Ye know on eath, and all ye need to know'. Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Pslams, to Isaiah, to St. John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels
four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say. ~ Jennifer Worth

The thing was, I didn't love him anymore. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a whole poetry movement. ~ Roberto Bolano

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous. ~ James Dickey

You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,
Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy
Laughter at the right moment, over the wine. ~ Callimachus

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever. ~ Anna Quindlen

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson