Thomas Moore Poems Quotes

A pretty wife is something for the fastidious vanity of a roue to retire upon. ~ Thomas Moore

Although the making of a religion of one's own can be satisfying, it can progress further and faster with the aid of the spiritual traditions. Your own spiritual path risks being too personal and limited. What resources do you have compared to the traditions that have thought of things you will never consider? They have refined ideas and images and teachings and moral guidelines expressed in elegant and inspiring ways. They have produced spiritual beauty of a kind no single person could ever create. Read Emerson's journals and you find that he was reading Hafiz for months, and Thoreau's homespun spiritual insights come wrapped in references from the Western and Eastern traditions. ~ Thomas Moore

Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames. ~ Thomas Moore

Learn to live small and you will discover great pleasures. You will accomplish more in your life than you could ever predict if you were overly ambitious. ~ Thomas Moore

In her extraordinary book, Ordinarily Sacred, Lynda Sexson teaches us how to catch the appearance of the sacred in the most ordinary objects and circumstances. ~ Thomas Moore

Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer. ~ Thomas Moore

Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of space for reflection and appreciation. ~ Thomas Moore

The light, that lies In woman's eyes, Has been my heart's undoing. ~ Thomas Moore

I have made many mistakes and done a lot of foolish things, but when I look back on the person I was, I feel affection for him and laugh at him. ~ Thomas Moore

It's my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change ... deep changes in life follow movements in imagination. ~ Thomas Moore

Flight usually intensifies the very thing one flees and establishes a special intimacy with it. ~ Thomas Moore

Every repast can have soul and can be enchanting; it asks for only a small degree of mindfulness and a habit of doing things with care and imagination. -Thomas Moore ~ Louisa Thomsen Brits

[In any] machine, the failure of one part to cooperate properly with the other part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperative for the purpose intended. - THOMAS EDISON R ~ Graham Moore

And soon, too soon, we part with pain, To sail o'er silent seas again. ~ Thomas Moore

Magine a trust in yourself, or another person, or in life itself, that doesn't need to be proved or demonstrated, that is able to contain uncertainty. People sometimes put their trust in a spiritual leader and are terribly betrayed if that person then fails to live up to ideals. But a real trust of faith would be to decide whether to trust someone, knowing that betrayal is inevitable because life and personality are never without shadow. The vulnerability that faith demands could be matched by an equal trust in oneself, the feeling that one can survive the pain of betrayal. ~ Thomas Moore

With what a deep devotedness of woe I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain, And memory, like a drop that, night and day, Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away! ~ Thomas Moore

Come o'er the sea,
Maiden with me,
Mine through the sunshine, storms and snows;
Seasons may roll,
But the true soul
Burns the same, where'er it goes. ~ Thomas Moore

A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology. ~ Thomas Moore

The young May moon is beaming, love.
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love.
How sweet to rove,
Through Morna's grove,
When the drowsy world is dreaming, love!
Then awake! - the heavens look bright, my dear,
'Tis never too late for delight, my dear,
And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear! ~ Thomas Moore

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness. ~ Thomas Moore

A few moments of silence may be all the meditation we need at times. Our homes could have a little space for withdrawal and quiet, and even a small garden could offer some distance from noise. ~ Thomas Moore

What's important is finding out what works for you. ~ Thomas Moore

Like ships that have gone down at sea, when heaven was all tranquillity. ~ Thomas Moore

The devil ... the prowde spirite ... cannot endure to be mocked. ~ Thomas Moore

That's the thing about angry words - once you spill them out, they are like a broken jar of honey on the floor, all sticky and mess. And no matter how hard you try to clean it up, you can always feel that sticky part of the tile" -Cordie ~ Shelley Moore Thomas

If you are often angry, trace the roots in story and then apply your anger as a force and a sharp edge to whatever you do. Don't indulge in venting. Always convert and transform your anger into something worthwhile. Let people see and feel your anger, but don't explode every time you feel it. ~ Thomas Moore

You might also understand the difference between force and strength, the former pressing too hard to achieve questionable ends, the latter a deep-seated power of soul. You might notice the difference between ego power and soul power, the former anxious and self-centered. Finally, you might appreciate the paradoxes involved, where being more vulnerable in a comfortable way gives you strength, and when you have some deep strength, you can finally feel vulnerable. ~ Thomas Moore

We can return now to one of Plato's expressions for care of the soul, techne tou biou, the craft of life. Care of the soul requires craft (techne) - skill, attention, and art. To live with a high degree of artfulness means to attend to the small things that keep the soul engaged in whatever we are doing, and it is the very heart of soul-making. ~ Thomas Moore

Spring and Autumn
Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's sob'rer time. ~ Thomas Moore

He revealed nothing. He nodded gravely. "I suppose it might be, ma'am, but I was hired to do the job and take the risks." "Figured I'd offer," Thomas said, unwilling to let the matter drop. "You tell me what you figure to do, and I'll be glad to help." "Another time." The marshal tasted his coffee again and looked directly at the girl. "You are new in Sentinel. Will you be staying long?" "No." "Do you have relatives here?" "No." He waited, but no explanation was offered. Fitz Moore was puzzled and he studied her from the corners of his eyes. There was no sound in the room but the ticking of the big, old-fashioned clock. The girl sat very still, the delicate line of her profile bringing to him a faint, lost feeling, a nostalgia from his boyhood when such women as she rode to hounds, when there was perfume on the air, blue grass, picket fences ... ~ Louis L'Amour

would first meet Thomas Edison, Paul watched a man burn ~ Graham Moore

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes. ~ Thomas Moore

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected. ~ Thomas Moore

Some early writing say that when people kiss, they exchange the soul, that it's between their mouths and tongues that the soul is exchanged. And so the kiss is more of a soulful connection maybe than intercourse and other ways of being together. A kiss asks a lot from you. I think it asks a lot from a person to really kiss. ~ Thomas Moore

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. ~ Donald Hall

Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves. ~ Thomas Moore

This heart, my own dear mother, bends,
With love's true instinct, back to thee! ~ Thomas Moore

Renaissance philosophers often said that it is the soul that makes us human. We can turn that idea round and note that it is when we are most human that we have greatest access to the soul. ~ Thomas Moore

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate. ~ Thomas Moore

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.
I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel.
To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.
It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature.
We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlock the star.
~Thomas Moore *Care of the Soul* ~ Thomas Moore

Every season hath its pleasure; Spring may boast her flowery prime, Yet the vineyard's ruby treasuries Brighten Autumn's sob'rer time. ~ Thomas Moore

Good Demeter mothering keeps a child in the heat and passion of life which immortalize and establish soulfulness. Mothering involves not only physical survival and achievement - Demeter's grain and fruit - it is also concerned with guiding a child to his or her unknown depths and the mystery of fate. ~ Thomas Moore

A man or a woman can inspire such deep fantasy and emotion that through the lovemaking embrace of a partners body we make break through the limits of the human condition to touch upon another level of reality. ~ Thomas Moore

I sometimes wonder if I'm built from old videotape. I feel archaic, worn from overuse and increasingly obscure. One day I'll get caught up in the grinding wheels of my own life and unravel. ~ David Thomas Moore

My only books were woman's looks, and folly's all they've taught me. ~ Thomas Moore