Keep awake - alive - New.
Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft.
Survive without calcification of the tender membranes.
Be a poet. Be alive.
- Tennessee Williams
"Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe - since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there's also no shortage of terror."
- Adam Zagajewski
Another Beauty
We've all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what's important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that's a life on the edge.
- Charles Wright
"Ninety percent of what we believe has nothing to do with the process of thought, but comes instead from the four sources of family inheritance, individual temperament, national culture, and economic self-interest; and while we cannot wholly cast off these shackles, we should at least recognize their cramping and distorting influence upon the free process of thought."
- Sydney J. Harris
"Thoughts in your head are really no different than the sound of a bird outside. It is just that you decide that they are more or less relevant."
- Adyashanti
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.
- Wisława Szymborska
from View With a Grain of Sand
translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh
My dear
is it true
that your mind is sometimes like
a battering ram
running all through the city,
shouting so madly inside and out
about the ten thousand things
that do not matter?
- Hafiz
transcend
I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.
- Jack Gilbert
from Rain
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
