Poetry We Call Life Quotes

Death is the end of the poetry we call life. ~ Debasish Mridha

A loose end - that's what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the end of the day exhausted from being all things to all people. ~ Anna Quindlen

I try to tell the teacher, you know. I don't give a fuck about geometry or English. Like I'm probably going to drive a truck or something when I get out of school. Join the army or something simple. I'm sure in the army they're all going to be wondering what an acute angle is. I'm sure I'll make lots of friends driving my truck because I can diagram some lousy goddamn sentence. And then after school I'm free, right? What's that mean? I go down to the bowling alley or the shopping mall with my friends. We scope the grils, smoke a little doobidge, maybe a tab of acid every now and then. But that's not really living, is it? I mean, if that's living, then excuse me right now. I'll go out and put a bullet in the old brainpan. But if that's not all there is, right, well, maybe there's something I could do a little less radical, like, you know. I don't mind life or anything--I'm perfectly willing to give it a try. So what the hell, I figured. I'm sick of school, drugs, this goddamn oppressive house of Ethel's and all. Maybe it's time I experimented a little more with my life, took a few more chances. So that's when I decided to become a warlock. To master the satanic arts of black magic. Devil worshiping, for you laymen. I want to master what they call the black arts. ~ Scott Bradfield

I think that whatever we encounter in life, we want to encourage a balance between the mind and the soul ... and that is to consider about 50% data from the mind and 50% data from the soul. This is what Buddhists call, "the middle way." ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own. ~ William E. Gladstone

That over these sea pastures, wide rolling watery prairies, and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like some slumberers in their beds; the ever rolling waves but made so by the restlessness. ~ Herman Melville

The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language ... everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. ~ Wilfred Owen

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know. ~ Pema Chodron

We are the center. In each of our minds - some may call it arrogance, or selfishness - we are the center, and all the world moves about us, and for us, and because of us. This is the paradox of community, the one and the whole, the desires of the one often in direct conflict with the needs of the whole. Who among us has not wondered if all the world is no more than a personal dream?

I do not believe that such thoughts are arrogant or selfish. It is simply a matter of perception; we can empathize with someone else, but we cannot truly see the world as another person sees it, or judge events as they affect the mind and the heart of another, even a friend.

But we must try. For the sake of all the world, we must try. This is the test of altruism, the most basic and undeniable ingredient for society. Therein lies the paradox, for ultimately, logically, we each must care more about ourselves than about others, and yet, if, as rational beings we follow that logical course, we place our needs and desires above the needs of our society, and then there is no community.

I come from Menzoberranzan, city of drow, city of self. I have seen that way of selfishness. I have seen it fail miserably. When self-indulgence rules, then all the community loses, and in the end, those striving for personal gains are left with nothing of any real value.

Because everything of value that we will know in this life comes from our relationships with those around u ~ R.A. Salvatore

Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the co ~ Oscar Wilde

ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity- the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough- but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It will be an ill day when our brethren take to bragging and boasting and call it 'testimony to the victorious Christian life.' We trust that holiness will be more than ever the aim of believers, but not the boastful holiness which has deluded some of the excellent of the earth into vain glory, and under which their firmest friends shudder for them. ~ Charles Spurgeon

There is no death! What seems so is transition; this life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life elysian, whose portal we call Death. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We all need the comforting illusion of stability and security in this shaky rooftop of a thing we call life. Tevye is right; we are all fiddlers, trying to scratch out a simple tune without breaking our necks. ~ Tara Ison

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls. ~ Aberjhani

Volume II: Chapter V
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I - I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever. ~ Mary Shelley

They all reproduce themselves, they all make something intended for music, they all express a feeling in their hearts by the exercise we call dance, they all believe in the after life of the soul. This belief is as much a PART of any man, ever born in any location, as his hands and his feet. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism. ~ Arthur Miller

Imagine God and Man set down together to play that game of chess that we call life. The one player is a master, the other a bungling amateur, so the outcome of the game cannot be in question. The amateur has free will, he does what he pleases, for it was he who chose to set up his will against that of the master in the first place; he throws the whole board into confusion time and again and by his foolishness delays the orderly ending of it all for countless generations, but every stupid move of his is dealt with by a masterly counterstroke, and slowly but inexorably the game sweeps on to the master's victory. But, mind you, the game could not move on at all without the full complement of pieces; Kings, Queens, Bishops, Knights, Pawns; the master does not lose sight of a single one of them. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

We buy things, not with money, but with our precious life we call time. ~ Debasish Mridha

I met with a group of a hundred or so fifth graders from a poor neighborhood at a school in Houston, Texas. Most of them were on a track that would never get them to college. So I decided then and there to make a contract with them. I would pay for their four-year college education if they kept a B average and stayed out of trouble. I made it clear that with focus, anyone could be above average, and I would provide mentoring support to them. I had a couple of key criteria: They had to stay out of jail. They couldn't get pregnant before graduating high school. Most importantly, they needed to contribute 20 hours of service per year to some organization in their community. Why did I add this? College is wonderful, but what was even more important to me was to teach them they had something to give, not just something to get in life. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it in the long run, but I was completely committed, and I signed a legally binding contract requiring me to deliver the funds. It's funny how motivating it can be when you have no choice but to move forward. I always say, if you want to take the island, you have to burn your boats! So I signed those contracts. Twenty-three of those kids worked with me from the fifth grade all the way to college. Several went on to graduate school, including law school! I call them my champions. Today they are social workers, business owners, and parents. Just a few years ago, we had a reunion, and I got to hear the magnificent ~ Tony Robbins

With our limited life spans, we mere mortals have to figure out what best to do with our time so that when it ends we aren't ashamed to put our name on it, call it our life. ~ Joey W. Hill

Many social justice or social activist movements have been rooted in a position. A position is usually against something. Any position will call up its opposition. If I say up, it generates down. If I say right, it really creates left. If I say good, it creates bad. So a position creates its opposition. A stand is something quite distinct from that.

There are synonyms for "stand" such as "declaration" or "commitment," but let me talk for just a few moments about the power of a stand. A stand comes from the heart, from the soul. A stand is always life affirming. A stand is always trustworthy. A stand is natural to who you are. When we use the phrase "take a stand" I'm really inviting you to un-cover, or "unconceal," or recognize, or affirm, or claim the stand that you already are.

Stand-takers are the people who actually change the course of history and are the source of causing an idea's time to come. Mahatma Gandhi was a stand-taker. He took a stand so powerful that it mobilized millions of people in a way that the completely unpredictable outcome of the British walking out of India did happen. And India became an independent nation. The stand that he took… or the stand that Martin Luther King, Jr. took or the stand that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony took for women's rights - those stands changed our lives today. The changes that have taken place in history as a result of the stand-takers are permanent changes, not temporary changes. The ~ Lynne Twist

Everyone has their own life, their own experiences. And sometimes we get pulled into the experiences of others." She glanced to the kitchen window and the faintly visible mountains beyond. She didn't want to think about Hunter's brusque phone call. "Their karma, so to speak, bumping into us... jostling us along the way. The lesson has nothing to do with us. It's their karma, not ours. ~ Danika Stone

I will tell you a thing about your new name," Stilgar said. "The choice pleases us. Muad'Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad'Dib creates his own water. Muad'Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad'Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad'Dib we call 'instructor-of-boys.' That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad'Dib, who is Usul among us. We welcome you." Stilgar ~ Frank Herbert

We humans may be brilliant and we may be special, but we are still connected to the rest of life. No one reminds us of this better than our dogs. Perhaps the human condition will always include attempts to remind ourselves that we are separate from the rest of the natural world. We are different from other animals; it's undeniably true. But while acknowledging that, we must acknowledge another truth, the truth that we are also the same. That is what dogs and their emotions give us
a connection. A connection to life on earth, to all that binds and cradles us, lest we begin to feel too alone. Dogs are our bridge
our connection wo who we really are, and most tellingly, who we want to be. When we call them home to us, it'as as if we are calling for home itself. And that'll do, dogs. That'll do. ~ Patricia B. McConnell

I have had the good fortune to live - as an inside witness and, even, a modest participant - at a time when our understanding of this wonder we call 'life' has made its most revolutionary advances. ~ Christian De Duve

Generally speaking, we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need. For example, a person who is trying to find his salvation only in a love relationship but who is being defeated by this too narrow focus is neurotic. He can become overly passive and dependent, fearful of venturing out on his own, of making his life without his partner, no matter how that partner treats him. The object has become his "All," his whole world; and he is reduced to the status of a simple reflex of another human being. ~ Ernest Becker

When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes ~ Ana Castillo

Sometimes, I hear people talk about the different men and women of the Old Testament, and there is a hint of jealousy. They may say it, or just insinuate it, but here's what they communicate...'What would it have been like to hear God's voice and see him move in such powerful ways? I wish it was the same for us as it was for those whose stories we read about in scripture. When I get to heaven I can't wait to ask David, Elijah, or Moses what it was like.' But I think it will be just the opposite in heaven. Before we can ask David what it was like to slay a giant, to win the battles, he'll say, Tell me what it was like on earth to have the Holy Spirit inside of you, giving you strength when you are weak. We might say to Elijah, What was it like to call down fire from heaven before the prophets of Baal and to raise that boy from the dead? And I think Elijah might say, yeah, he actually ended up dying again. You tell me what it's like to have God living inside of you. What was it like to live life on earth with the Holy Spirit giving you joy when you're depressed or giving you the power to overcome that sin in your life? We might say to Moses, What was it like to follow the cloud by day and the fire by night? What was it like to meet with God on that Mountain? And Moses might say, I had to climb that mountain to meet with God. You tell me what it was like to have him dwell in you everyday. What was it like to have the Holy Spirit giving you directions when you didn't know what to ~ Kyle Idleman

The terrible shock of his sentence had in some way broken that wall which separates us from the mystery of things beyond and which we call life. ~ Victor Hugo

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake. ~ Siri Hustvedt

When you remember that you are a unique and very important person created by a divine being we call God, and in "His" very image, then you relax well knowing that your life is a divine plan, and your job is to surrender and allow ~ Jacinta Mpalyenkana

Eternity will be wonderful, but there is one thing heaven will not contain, and that is the call, the possibility, and the privilege of living a supernatural life here and now by faith, before we meet Jesus face to face. ~ Francis Schaeffer

One will sooner or later discover they are the choreographer of this dance we call life. ~ Dawn Tevy

What is so often said about the solders of the 20th century is that they fought to make us free. Which is a wonderful sentiment and one witch should evoke tremendous gratitude if in fact there was a shred of truth in that statement but, it's not true. It's not even close to true in fact it's the opposite of truth.

There's this myth around that people believe that the way to honor deaths of so many of millions of people; that the way to honor is to say that we achieved some tangible, positive, good, out of their death's. That's how we are supposed to honor their deaths. We can try and rescue some positive and forward momentum of human progress, of human virtue from these hundreds of millions of death's but we don't do it by pretending that they'd died to set us free because we are less free; far less free now then we were before these slaughters began. These people did not die to set us free. They did not die fighting any enemy other than the ones that the previous deaths created.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. Solders are paid killers, and I say this with a great degree of sympathy to young men and women who are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor is accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions. We create the possibility of moral choice by communicating truth about ethics to people. That to me is where ~ Stefan Molyneux

What we call stress is just extension of being busy without meaning. When you do things that are not meaningful to you, just to get the sense of completion, just to feel like you got something done, your spirit feels empty. So, the most important thing for people to realize is that you have to control the flow of information in your life. ~ Tony Robbins

You just take and take don´t you? Out there with your thumb in the air - not a care in the world, just grabbing whatever you can get. Yes, sir, you just take and take until you´re ready to burst. But what about giving? Did you ever think about that? Of course not - you´re too busy taking, Mr. Handout, Mr. Gimmee, Gimmee, Gimmee. Me, I´m what you call a ´taxpayer.´ Tax, it´s a... tariff that working people have to pay so that someone like yourself can enjoy a life of leisure. I give and give until I´ve got nothing left! Nothing! Then I turn around and give some more. I give and I give to all of Uncle Sam´s little takers, every last one of you, but what´s in it for me? I´ve been thinking that maybe it´s time I get a little something in retum. Yes, indeed, maybe it´s about time we try that shoe on the other foot for a change. You, my young friend, are going to wash my car inside and out. And you´re going to pay for it! ~ David Sedaris

People who have, in a sense, asked Him to join them on their life journey, to follow them wherever they feel they should go, rather than following Him as we are commanded. The God of the universe is not something we can just add to our lives and keep on as we did before. The Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is not someone we can just call on when we want a little extra power in our lives. Jesus Christ did not die in order to follow us. He died and rose again so that we could forget everything else and follow Him to the cross, to true Life. ~ Francis Chan

Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel. ~ Teju Cole

Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. How often I think of that 'ought.' No sugary sentiment there. Just the stern, glorious trumpet call, OUGHT. But can words tell the joy buried deep within? Mine cannot. It laughs at words. ~ Amy Carmichael

Just imagine the existence of a man - let us call him A - who has left youth far behind, and of a woman whom we may call B, who is young and happy and has seen nothing as yet of life or of the world. Family circumstances of various kinds brought them together, and he grew to love her as a daughter, and had no fear that his love would change its nature. But he forgot that B was so young, that life was still a May-game to her and that it was easy to fall in love with her in a different way, and that this would amuse her. He made a mistake and was suddenly aware of another feeling, as heavy as remorse, making its way into his heart, and he was afraid. He was afraid that their old friendly relations would be destroyed, and he made up his mind to go away before that happened. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Every man produces only to the capacity of their philosophies of life or doctrines as we Christians call it. ~ Sunday Adelaja

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it. ~ Bill Bryson

Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded must sometime feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. ~ Dan Beachy-Quick

There are moments of silence and smiles and breaths taken away from the chest, wherein you truly feel a deep understanding for your position in your life, in this world, and within the walls of yourself that you call bones and tissue. You madly understand yourself (your thoughts, your desires, what you want to be living for, really) and it's amazing because it is within those moments where you will come to see how very few people should actually be important to your heart and to your path: because your heart and your path are glorious and different and breathtaking and not everyone belongs there with you. We all often feel pangs of loneliness and we clamour to hold onto other people because it has not yet dawned on us, that not everyone we wish to hold onto will fit on our paths with us. If you could come to an understanding of your own space, and what it means to occupy that space, then you would come to know, and to feel, and to realise, that we are not lonely in our hearts because others do not occupy with us; rather, we are painfully lonely in our hearts because we do not occupy our own skin. We do not occupy our own souls. We do not occupy the space we've been given by our own dreams, desires, longings... what makes you cry? What makes you laugh? It doesn't matter if you're the only one who cries or who laughs! What matters is that you fill up your space so full that your soul rubs up against your bones and pushes up against just below the surface of your skin. You will ~ C. JoyBell C.

We came to this world with love and hope to bloom like a flower, to beautify this garden we call earth, and spread the fragrance of happiness. ~ Debasish Mridha