I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
~Joyce Kilmer, "Trees," 1914
How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life.
~Katherine Mansfield
"We cannot see our reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see."
~Taoist proverb
Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?
~Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witching of the soft blue sky!
- William Wordsworth, Peter Bell
Take me and cast me where you will; I shall still be possessor of the divinity within me, serene and content.
~Marcus Aurelius
"What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story, And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams."
Pedro Calderon de la Barca
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
~John Keats, Endymion
Cloud-walls of the morning's gray
Faced with amber column,
Crowned with crimson cupola
From a sunset solemn.
May-mists, for the casements, fetch,
Pale and glimmering,
With a sunbeam hid in each,
And a smell of spring.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson
Little flower -- but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
~Lord Alfred Tennyson, "Flower in the crannied wall"
"O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other."
~Thomas Carlyle
The French Revolution, vol. I, book II, chapter 1
“Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.”
-William Makepeace Thackeray
