A bird does not sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song. --Chinese Proverb

A book is like a garden you carry in your pocket. --Arab Proverb

A briefer length of moon Will mark the sea-line and the yellow dune. --Arna Bontemps

A brooding hush without a stir or note, the air so thick it clotted in my throat. --James Thomson

...a camel beareth labour, and heat, and hunger, and thirst, through deserts of sand, and fainteth not. --Akhenaton

A city no one ever knew, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown. --V. S. Naipaul

A cloud has risen between the Light of Heaven and me, to hide his city from my melancholy heart. --Li Po

A crimson tree, black grass,
salt on the first shoots of light --Octavio Paz

A crow doesn't need a shadow. --Jason Growler

A day... is a miniature eternity. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

A delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum. --Sappho

A desert fills our seeing's inward span. --John Keats

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot. --Walt Whitman

A dull yellow light came down from the sky, and I heard the creaking of the twisted trees as they swung in the wind. --Tanith Lee

A gull is locked like a ghost in the blue attic of heaven. --Charles Wright

A king is one who has "few things to desire and many things to fear." --Francis Bacon

A liar should have a good memory. --Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

A lie travels round the world while truth is putting her boots on. --French Proverb

A little help is worth a great deal of pity. --anon

A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass, a purer sapphire melts into the sea. --Alfred Tennyson

A lonely moor, silent and dark and tractless swells. --Charlotte Bronte

A man must insult himself before others will. --Chinese Proverb

A man never stands as tall as when he kneels to help a child. --Knights of Pythagoras

A master drummer must have seven eyes. --West African Proverb

A person of courage today is a person of peace. --Bill Mollison

A pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. --Gerard Manley Hopkins

A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain. --Arab Proverb

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. --W. H. Auden

A ripe melon falls by itself. --Zimbabwean Proverb

A rumour goes in one ear and out many mouths. --Chinese Proverb

A sad astrology, the boundless plan
That makes you tyrants in your iron skies --Alfred Tennyson

A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable! --Sylvia Plath

A table is not blessed until it has fed scholars. --Yiddish Proverb

A throne is only a bench covered with velvet. --French Proverb

A Tiger does not have to proclaim his Tigritude. --Nigerian Proverb

A wandering madman was seeking the touchstone, with matted locks, tawny and dust-laden, and body worn to a shadow, his lips tight-pressed. --Rabindranath Tagore

Above all things, reverence yourself. --Pythagoras

Aching eyes lift in tremolo from their darker edges. --Annie Finch

Act nothing in furious passion. It's putting to sea in a storm. --Thomas Fuller

Action is eloquence. --Shakespeare

Add legs to the snake after you have finished drawing it. --Chinese Proverb

Adventure is worthwhile in itself. --Amelia Earhart

After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box. --Italian Proverb

Ah! What a sign it is of evil life, when death's approach is seen so terrible! --Shakespeare

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches. --Walt Whitman

All battles are won before they are fought. --Sun Tzu

All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd To the dancers dancing in tune --Alfred Tennyson

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge --Dante Rossetti

All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious. --Homer

All war is deception. --Sun Tzu

Allah does not destroy the men whom one hates. --African Proverb

Already you had tapped my pith
and delved each strata separate.

Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you. --William Blake

Always there remain portions of our heart into which no one is able to enter, invite them as we may. --Mary Dixon Thayer

...amber dust and the scent of oranges, peaches, apricots, and volcanoes blazed somewhere. --Tanith Lee

Among all the kinds of serpents, there is none comparable to the Dragon. --Edward Topsell

...an eerie, starless, sunless world without night; objects are hazy without edges, as if they were merely substantial concepts.

An old cypress, with branches like green bronze and roots like granite. --Du Fu

And a moist mirage in desert eyes, that so, when the rotten hustings shake
In another month to his brazen lies, a wretched vote may be gain'd. --Alfred Tennyson

And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me. --Alfred Tennyson

And as soft waters warble to the moon, our answering spirits chime one roundelay. --Dante Rossetti

And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath with a loyal people shouting a battle cry,
till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly far into the North, and battle, and seas of death. --Alfred Tennyson

And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all. --Socrates

And joy I knew and sorrow at thy voice, and the superb magnificence of love. --Bliss Carman

And leaden-eyed despairs; where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes... --John Keats

And moonlight; ay, to all the magic world Of silvery enchantment! --John Keats

And now, benighted, tempest-tossed, must bear alone the weary strife. --Charlotte Bronte

And when they all were seated, a service like a drum kept beating, beating --Emily Dickenson

Any time that is not spent on love is wasted. --Tasso

As I came through the desert: All was black, in heaven no single star. --James Thomson

As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire glared at me throbbing with a starved desire. --James Thomson

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. --Abraham Lincoln

As rivers lose name and form when they disappear into the sea, the sage leaves behind all traces when he disappears into the light. --Upanishads

As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was. --Akhenaton

As the year Grows lush in juicy stalks... my little boat, with streams that deepen freshly into bowers. --John Keats

Bachelard's idea of the plasticity of psychic substance, that it is like paste, clay, dough, molten metal. --James Hillman.

Back to the green deeps of the outer bay the red and amber currents glide and cringe. --Charles Roberts

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you. --Frederick Nietsche

Because I have been athirst I will dig a well that others may drink. --Arabian Proverb

Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. --I Ching

Being arches itself over the vast abyss. --Rainer Rilke

Beside the pounding cataracts midnight streams unknown to us
Lurid and lofty and vast it seems; The City of the End of Things. --Archibald Lampman

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. --Confucius

Better to cry your heart out than always sigh. --Chinese Proverb

Between true friends even water drunk together is sweet enough. --Zimbabwean Proverb

Between two evils, I always like to take the one I've never tried before. --Mae West

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bitter rain in my courtyard
In the decline of Autumn. --Wu Tsao

Blow, west-wind, by the lonely mound, and murmur, summer-streams. --Emily Jane Bronte

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun. --Frank Lloyd Wright

But all thing which that shineth as the gold
Ne is no gold, as I have herd it told. --Geoffrey Chaucer

Butterflies, off banks of noon, leap, plashless, as they swim. --Emily Dickinson

By concentrating upon the image in which time is embedded, part of which imagery is number symbolics, we are stressing the quality of time, as did Artemidorus. --James Hillman

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality. --Goethe

Chest pounding, you reach the birthplace of clouds. --Du Fu

Chilled by the wind from the open window. Empty and void, it sparkles white in the moonlight. --Amy Lowell

Come not between the dragon and his wrath. --Shakespeare

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright as sunlight on a stream. --Christina Rossetti

Coming, going, the waterbirds don't leave a trace, don't follow a path. --Dogen

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. --Christian Bovee

Contraria sunt Complementa. --Niels Bohr

Conversing with the animal forms of wisdom night and day, that, risen from the sea of fire, renew'd walk o'er the Earth. --William Blake

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once. --Shakespeare

Crawfish grey, or crafty Mermaids stole them away... --Edward Lear

Cursing the weather is never good farming. --Cheshire Proverb

Dappled with dew, are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through. --Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dates and sharp bullaces, rare pears and greengages... --Christina Rossetti

Death forces each of us into a dance without partners in the individual shape of our mask. --James Hillman

Deeds speak louder than words. --Assiniboine Proverb

Despair is the conclusion of fools. --Benjamin Disraeli

dice from the ancient game
the elements endlessly play
it goes on through a plain,
each step
a legend from geology --Octavio Paz

...diminishing behind a luminous fringe of cream-white surf and wandering wraiths of spray. --Charles Roberts

...discerning even one goblin raving, whisking, tumbling, hobbling. --Christina Rossetti

Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins. --Cheyenne Proverb

Do not wait for leaders. Do it alone, person to person. --Mother Teresa

Do thou snatch treasures from my lips, and I'll take kingdoms back from thine. --Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Don't let yesterday use up too much of today. --Cherokee Proverb

Don't take life too serious, son...it ain't nohow permanent. --Walt Kelly

Don't worry, spiders, I keep house casually. --Kobayashi Issa

Dreams are real while they last-- can we say more of life? --Havelock Ellis

Dreams do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise. --Carl Jung

Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe Our hermit spirits dwell. --John Keble

Each thing is of like form everlasting and comes round again in its cycle. --Marcus Aurelius

Earth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal. --Thomas Moore

Earth is but the frozen echo of the silent voice of God. --Samuel M. Hageman

Eat with the rich, but go play with the poor. --Logan Pearsall Smith

Echoing grottoes, full of tumbling waves! --John Keats

E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
That falls through the clear ether silently. --John Keats

Eh! Je suis leur chef, il fallait bien les suivre. --Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

Even as the trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temple's self, so does the moon... --John Keats

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom. --Michel de Montaigne

Even when our sleeves brush together it is our karma. --Japanese Proverb

Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath:
That when the peace is garner'd in from strife... --Dante Rossetti

Even your garment plunders my eyes. --Sappho

Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors. --Plato

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. --Thomas A. Edison

Everything may happen. --Seneca

Far away a mountain zone, a cold, white waste of snow-drifts lies. --Charlotte Bronte

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more. --Alfred Tennyson

Fear to lose a drop and you will spill a lot. --Malayan Proverb

Finches fill them till they glow from their darker edges. --Annie Finch

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. --Mahatma Gandhi

Fly to me, like a dove into my heart.

For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant. --Walt Whitman

For then, perhaps, as a child of deceit, she might by a true descent be untrue. --Alfred Tennyson

Forest sways,
rocks press heavily,
roots grip,
tree-trunk close to tree-trunk.
Wave upon wave breaks, foaming,
deepest cavern provides shelter. --Goethe

Fortune favors the brave. --Virgil

From every page rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

From the dark cool sands they watched me drink between the willow's roots; cowlings hid their eyes.

From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. --Napoleon

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. --Rabindranath Tagore

Fronds shake like tousled arrows from their darker edges. --Annie Finch

Full wise is he that can himselven knowe. --Geoffrey Chaucer

Glory is the shadow of virtue. --Latin Proverb

Glowing, lustrous, so small and precious, heavy with desire, burning my palm.

Go is Japanese for five; Krida is Sanskrit for play.

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. --Voltaire

Good fortune often abides with a fool. --Irish Proverb

Good words are like a string of pearls. --Chinese Proverb

Great key to golden palaces, strange ministrelsy, fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves. --John Keats

Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste the pleasant sunrise. --John Keats

...grim scent of twilight winds and a hushed patten in the vestry dust.

Happiness never decreases by being shared. --Buddha

Hastily, across the wide windows
Where the melted gold pours. --Renée Vivien

Hate shuts her soul when dove-eyed mercy pleads. --Charles Sprague

Hatred is the madness of the heart. --Lord Byron

Have a mouth as sharp as a dagger but a heart as soft as tofu. --Chinese Proverb

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods. --Socrates

He leaned back into the lacquered shadows and tapped his fingers together, amusement lighting the whites of his eyes.

He on the tender grass Would sit, and hearken even to ecstasy. --John Milton

He reached out for a piece of cake from the luncheon table, looked around him carefully, and dipped it in the cream jug. --Tove Jansson

He stood under a brackish sky trembling and blaming creation. --Lucille Clifton

He takes in kind arms silently, And shuts the door. --Dinah Craik

He that hath a head of wax must not walk in the sun. --Latin Proverb

He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them. --Chinese Proverb

He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount. --Chinese Proverb

He who wants a rose must respect the thorn. --Persian Proverb

Heavy Nimbus, candent arras: Life is solidified Light, imbibed lucent nectar.

Her private orchards, walled on every side,
To lawless sylvans all access denied. --Alexander Pope

Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves. --Carol Pearson

Hidden in the high fog the house we live in, beneath the magnetic rock, rain-, rainbow-ridden. --Elizabeth Bishop

His building is a palace without design; the passages are tortuous, the rooms disfigured with senseless gilding, ill-ventilated, and horribly crowded with knick-knacks. --C. S. Lewis

His eyes were shut, yet open; vacant and peaceful to any stranger.

His eynyn arn of cristal, Lokyn al in aumbyr. --anon

His notice sudden is. --Emily Dickinson

History is not what you think. It is what you can remember. --Sellar and Yeatman

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. --Robert Frost

Hope is a memory of the future. --Gabriel Marcel

...how a mystic Shape did move behind me, and drew me backward by the hair. --Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I am a little world made cunningly of elements and an angelic sprite. --John Donne

I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad. --Alfred Tennyson

I am not very fond of moralistic tales, for they often lack clarity. --Ursula LeGuin

I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it. --Voltaire

I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set our foot upon some reverend history. --John Webster

I felt his huge and yellow stare plant something foreign in me. --Thorkild Bjornvig

I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe. --Dalai Lama

I have no family now. Without love we are nothing. --Gloria Larsen

I heard no sound where I stood or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swell’d now and then in the dim-gray dawn. --Alfred Tennyson

I knew a way to feel the sun as if a statue felt warm eyes. --Annie Finch

I know 'tis but a Dream, yet... Must I die under it? Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me? --Samuel Coleridge

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here. --Sylvia Plath

I like best of all autumn, the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. --Lin Yutang

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. --Willa Cather

I live like ashes, easily moved by the wind from place to place. --Wayan Sadra

I loiter on the jeweled staircase and regret the wasted years. --Wu Tsao

I saw a serpent rise between the white pillars of the door. --William Blake

I, so cold, may once have seen
Sunlight, once have felt the sun. --Christina Rossetti

I spend the night alone in the river city, using up all of the candles. --Du Fu

I still want to see in blossoms at dawn the face of the mountain god --Basho

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. --Carl Sandburg

I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters. --Hildegard von Bingen

I turned, and saw them whispering about it. --Thomas Edward Brown

I want to bring the wind wherever I go so I won't be lonely. --Janna Fikkan

I will hew great windows, wonderful windows, measureless windows for my soul. --Angela Morgan

I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishing-boat. --Li Po

I will not let down the blinds of spotted bamboo from their silver hook. --Wu Tsao

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. --Bertrand Russell

If all seeds that fall were to grow, then no one could follow the path under the trees. --Akan Proverb

If him wratheth, be ywar and his way shun. --Piers Plowman

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. --Isaac Newton

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree whose fruit threw death on else immortal us... --John Donne

If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it. --Edward Murphy

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If wines are like liquid stars
Let us find, in you, Burgundy, the creation
Of the fabulous monsters of the ether and of the void --Robert Desnos

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. --Chinese Proverb

If you don't ask, you don't get. --Mahatma Gandhi

If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive. --Elbert Hubbard

If you walk on snow you cannot hide your footprints. --Chinese Proverb

If you want time you must make it. --Charles Buxton

Ignorant of the water I go seeking
a death full of light consumes me. --Federico García Lorca

"I'm told that you are a murderous thug." His words were easy, urbane, almost cordial. --R. A. MacAvoy

In a truly heroic life there is no preadventure. It is always doing or dying. --R.D. Hitchcock

In clear moonlight, her jade-white arms are cold. --Du Fu

In country like this, you can stop along any road for a moment and look at a farmhouse sitting in the midst of maize and hemp-- and immediately a story is born. --Giovanni Guareschi

In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; a grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak. --James Russell Lowell

In death thy glory in heaven, in victory thy glory on earth. --Bhagavad Gita

In peace time sweat more, in war time bleed less. --Chinese Proverb

In the clamorous tangle and fairy shade, even the ocean becomes an enchanted grotto...

In the ecstasy of dance, man bridges the chasm between this and the other world. --Curt Sachs

In the night rain, chives are cut for the freshly steamed rice. --Du Fu

In the small orb of one particular tear. --Shakespeare

In the window full of sunlight concentrates her golden shadow fold on fold, until it glows. --David Lawrence

...in their lairs, caught between the fires of the Tegu and the violent carnivals of the docks.

In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli bodies of holy men and women exude miraculous oil, odour of violet. --William Butler Yeats

In wildness is the preservation of the world. --Henry David Thoreau

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me --e. e. cummings

It is better to get into trouble than not get into anything at all. --Danish Proverb

It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor. --Eric Hoffer

It is not a secret if three know it. --Celtic Proverb

It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy. --Nora Ephron

It is suffused o'er all the sapphire Heaven, Trees, herbage, snake-like stream, unwrinkled Lake... --Samuel Coleridge

It matters not how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate. --William Henley

It requires more courage to suffer than to die. --Napoleon Bonaparte

It takes little effort to watch a man carry a load. --Chinese Proverb

It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth once they inherit it. --Kin Hubbard

It's kind of fun to do the impossible. --Walt Disney

Its roofs and iron towers have grown None knoweth how high within the night. --Archibald Lampman

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound! --Zen Proverb

Knowledge that is not used is abused. --Cree Proverb

Large desire is large poverty. --Indian Proverb

Leave your people in their chosen glen or nook, and they will be happy.

let me go, the horizon Oasis
touch clear rizened air

Let us all be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. --Thomas Browne

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways. --Stephen Vincent Benet

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult. --Hippocrates

Life is so short, we must move very slowly. --Thai Proverb

Light breaks where no sun shines; where no sea runs, the waters of the heart push in their tides. --Dylan Thomas

Like the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune. --Dante Rossetti

Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other's wings --Christina Rosetti

Listen to the sound of the river and you'll get a trout. --Celtic Proverb

Lo, and Metal flees from the People of the Sky.

Lofty halls are lined with gold, Black earth is hidden under layers of marble. --Ovid

Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with a mustache. --Ajahn Chah

Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day. --Walt Whitman

Love and dignity cannot share the same abode. --Ovid

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. --Ursula LeGuin

Love has no reason.

Love is blind. --Geoffrey Chaucer

lovers alone wear sunlight --e. e. cummings

Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it. --Walt Whitman

Magic transfers celestial forces to the medium in which such forces can operate. --Theophrastus Paracelsus

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. --Seattle

Many receive advice, few profit by it. --Publilius Syrus

May the warp be the white light of morning,
May the weft be the red light of evening,
May the fringes be the falling rain,
May the border be the standing rainbow.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness. --Tewa Indian Song

Melquíades' parchments... intact among the prehistoric plants and steaming puddles and luminous insects that had removed all trace of man's passage on earth from the room... --Gabriel Marquez

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. --George Orwell

Men die because they cannot join the beginning to the end. --Alcmeon of Croton

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. --Winston Churchill

Mend the pen only after the sheep are all gone. --Chinese Proverb

Monks who have a talent for it play go with women and become their lovers. --Yamaoka Genrin

Moon lit your blood in the jasmine-blooming gardens. --Annie Finch

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power. --Seneca

Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else. --Federico García Lorca

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything. --Plato

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. --Robert Fripp

My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms -- will it return to my body when they scatter? --Kotomichi

Naturally if a fish left water it is unlikely to return. --Thai Proverb

Nay, no cold metal for me: I am Life, and Leaf, and breath-out-of-doors.

Near Antofagasta the entire salt plain speaks: it is a broken voice, a song full of grief. --Pablo Neruda

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov

Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. --anon

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. --William Blake

No one else has the answer.
No other place will be better,
and it has already turned out. --Lao Tzu

No sconce or fortress of his raising was ever known either to have been forced, or yielded up, or quitted. --John Milton

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. --Voltaire

Not even the angels stand higher than the man who took the wrong way and then returned. --Talmud

Not even the wind ties up
a small abandoned boat.
the moon is a clear
mark of midnight. --Dogen

Not in cloud and not in thunder. --Isa Craig Knox

Not the stoutest band of mailed heroes should tear off my crown: Yet would I kneel and kiss thy gentle hand. --John Keats

Nothing endures but change. --Heraclitus

Nothing goes right but as part of the pattern. Only in it is freedom. --Ursula LeGuin

Nothing is as soft as fire.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man. --George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself. --Earl Wilson

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. --Michel de Montaigne

...now to be taken, or forever passed away.

Now while the early budders are just new,
And run in mazes of the youngest hue
About old forests. --John Keats

O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant. --Shakespeare

O snap the fife and still the drums and show the monster as she is. --Richard Le Gallienne

O soft embalmer of the still midnight! --John Keats

Of twelve sweet hours that past in bridal white, and died to live, long as my pulses play. --Alfred Tennyson

Of night's flood-tide,--like terrors that agree
Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea --Dante Rossetti

Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps. --Marianne Moore

Oh beautiful black woman, oh moon, where are you going so slowly
To find your spouse with his plum-colored eyes
Whose bed Venus warmed with a gallant body? --Robert Desnos

Oh for a life of sensations rather than thoughts. --John Keats

On a steep slope, orange trees are interspersed with olive and walnut trees, grapes are trained to cover trellises... --John McPhee

On your slender body, jade and coral girdle ornaments chime. --Wu Tsao

Once water held my reflection:
now faith combs your hair.

One, from his high bright window in a tower,
Leans out, as evening falls,
And sees the advancing curtain of the shower
Splashing its silver on roofs and walls. --Conrad Aiken

One is never too old to yearn. --Italian Proverb

One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it. --French Proverb

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire. --John Watson Foster

One should count each day a separate life. --Seneca

One who sets the entire army in motion to chase an advantage will not attain it. --Sun Tzu

Only the dead have seen an end to war. --Plato

Our kingdoms, shrouded by hoary baobobs, where saffron leopards ravened in lustrous shadows...

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls. --Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. --M. Kathleen Casey

Painless poverty is better than embittered wealth. --Greek Proverb

Paradox is the nature of essence.

Pass through this gateless gate, and you walk freely between heaven and earth. --Mumon Ekai

Patience is power; with time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes silk. --Chinese Proverb

Patience, patience
Patience in the blue sky
Every atom of silence
Is the chance of a ripe fruit. --Paul Valery

Peace and tranquillity are a thousand gold pieces. --Chinese Proverb

Peace is the well from which the stream of joy runs. --Gaelic Proverb

People are man's medicine. --Senegalese Proverb

People living deeply have no fear of death. --Anais Nin

People only see what they are prepared to see. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pero tú no sabrás dónde se ocultan
el corazón de sapo o la violeta. --Federico García Lorca

...pink rice-grains, ink bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green lilies... --Marianne Moore

...pouring light equally across the salt sea and lambent flowered fields. --Sappho

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. --John Lehman

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power. --John Steinbeck

Praise the fine day in the evening. --Gaelic Proverb

Prepare for noise. But never scream. --Annie Finch

Profoundly still the twilight air, Lifeless the landscape. --Charlotte Bronte

Qon Oshen presented latticed towers, phantasmal soaring bridgeways, a game board of square plazas and circular trafficuli. --Tanith Lee

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun... --Gerard Manley Hopkins

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. --Confucius

Red leaves fell into her red hair and over her scarred, misused, unnoticed feet. --Tanith Lee

Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. --Goethe

Revenge is a confession of pain. --Latin Proverb

Rock salt, a mountain of buried light, a cathedral through which light passes, crystal of the sea, abandoned by the waves. --Pablo Neruda

Run away from a tiger and into a crocodile. --Thai Proverb

Sea-ward, white gleaming thro' the busy scud With arching Wings, the sea-mew o'er my head --Samuel Coleridge

Sería el guardían que en la noche de mi tránsito
prohibiera en absoluto la entrada a la luna. --Federico García Lorca

Service to others is our rent here on earth. --Mohammad Ali

Sharp wind, towering sky, apes howling mournfully; untouched island, white sand, birds flying in circles. --Du Fu

She dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees false waves in desert drouth. --Christina Rossetti

Silence has so much meaning. --Yurok Proverb

Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone. --G. B. Stern

Silk covers your arms, your fingers, your lips, your voice. --Annie Finch

...silk tatters soughed in the fetid air, and from the shadows her mosquito-soft voice goaded.

...singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die, till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean. --Alfred Tennyson

Skin and house are a lucid casing,
a film just grazing the idea of form.

Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes. --Dante Rossetti

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirits. --John Keats

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography. --Paul Rodriguez

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing. --Albert Einstein

Soon clad, the reaper, provident of want, Hies cheerful hearted to the ripen'd field. --Gilbert White

Space is the breath of art. --Frank Lloyd Wright

Speak slow green crests to me, of sargasso, embryonic clams, of Larimar drowned in Tokyo trenches.

Speak the truth, but leave immediately after. --Slovenian Proverb

Spring rain
leaking through the roof
dripping from the wasps' nest --Basho

staring up at where a new moon should be --Tim Jensen

Stars and Darkness, Sun and red Flame: the names of the righteous are written on trembling air.

Stateliest couches, with rich arras spread. --William Cowper

Stealthily, in the old reluctant way, the red flats are uncovered, mile on mile, to glitter in the sun a golden while. --Charles Roberts

Submerged shafts of the sun, split like spun glass... --Marianne Moore

Success is the child of audacity. --Benjamin Disraeli

Suddenly it is the Autumn Feast of the Dead. --Wu Tsao

Suppose it is within a gate which open is open at the hour of closing summer that is to say it is so. --Gertrude Stein

Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge. --Shakespeare

Sweet robust dreams, the soft hiss of breath caught and released.

Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice inside the ceiling laugh. --Japanese Proverb

Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tender is the night, and haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne. --John Keats

Thanatos is the only god who loves not gifts, who has no altars and receives no hymns. --Aeschylus

That broad noon has never lit, And shout a secret to the stone. --William Butler Yeats

That hour-glass-backed, orchard-legged, heavy-headed will --Annie Finch

that is nothing but light-- scalding, aortal light
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones. --Mary Oliver

That weird wan moon and pitiless sun, and my own shadow in the grass. --Sarah Piatt

That which God writes on thy forehead, thou wilt come to it. --Koran

The alders and valley, the dweomer-light, love and our children, the Beginning itself~ all are woven of stories. Only stories remain.

The algae and the branches in shadow shadowed her, and the nightingale sang for the white girl. --Federico García Lorca

The best person is like water.
Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them.
It dwells in lowly places that all disdain.
This is why it is so close to the Way. --Lao-tzu

The birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees, shook open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away. --Mary Oliver

The bitter heart eats its owner. --Tswana Proverb

The blue water-mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets Though fishermen are sleeping... --Sylvia Plath

The boatsman reacheth the landing partly by pulling, partly by letting go. --Egyptian Proverb

The breeze three odors brought, and a gem-flower waved in a wand! --Robert Frost

the countercharm of space and hollow sky --Alfred Tennyson

The destruction of the gates and of the underworld and soul occurs any morning. --James Hillman

The dream had been dark wet sand, shifting above water. --Leslie Silko

The dream is no more a compensation than is Hades a region balanced by another one. --James Hillman

The Earth addreading to be ouerwhurld, what now auailes, quoth She, my ballance weight? --Gabriel Harvey

The endless ripples and tides, the shadowed skies of drowned cities.

The enlightened man is like a dragon supported by deep waters or like a tiger that commands its mountain retreat. --Setcho

The envious waves forbid the trace to stay. --Anna Seward

The fiery Sky, eclipsed by Earth's heaving mountains...

The first casualty of war is truth. --Rudyard Kipling

The first rule to tinkering is to save all the parts. --Paul Erlich

The fitful alternations of the rain drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere. --Percy Shelley

The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion. --William Blake

The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose. --Hada Bejar

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. --Eleanor Roosevelt

The garrulous waves ceaselessly talked of hidden treasures. --Rabindranath Tagore

The glorious planet Sol in noble eminence enthroned and sphered Amidst the other. --Shakespeare

The grandeur of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead... --John Keats

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. --Socrates

The guilty think all talk is of themselves. --Geoffrey Chaucer

The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of. --Charles Perkhurst

The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. --Jacques Bénigne Bossuel

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart. --Benjamin Franklin

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast. --Akhenaton

The house below the hill, where one poor lamp begins to shine... --Sarah Piatt

The hunter in pursuit of an elephant does not stop to throw stones at birds. --Ugandan Proverb

...the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes. --Walt Whitman

The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take away our land and we die. --Mary Brave Bird

The library shelves were obscured by neatly-tied manuscripts, leather-bound vellum tomes inset with gems, stacks of loose-leaf arcane catalogues and crumbling ledgers of forgotten kingdoms.

The life and activities of the Soul are not those of the Expiator. --Plotinus

The lush babe embosomed, sweet head and hair; thine own suckling thriven, adorned kisses withal.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. --Henry David Thoreau

The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings. --Henri Frederic Amiel

The marksman hitteth the target partly by pulling, partly by letting go. --Egyptian Proverb

The moon promises warmth, river stones say you will wake me.

the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees --Archibald MacLeish

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. --Lao-Tzu

The nearest to my heart are a king without a kingdom and a poor man who does not know how to beg. --Khalil Gibran

The night air spreads the dust from many worlds. --Renée Vivien

The noontide sun is dark, and music discord, when the heart is low. --Edward Young

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only cure for love is marriage. --Celtic Proverb

The oxen toil sombrely o'er the level to the weir, and drag a long black trail across the light. --Charles Roberts

The palest ink is better than the best memory. --Chinese Proverb

The pasture gleams and glooms 'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. --Dante Rossetti

The paths of Wu Palace are crooked with weeds;
The garments of Chin are ancient dust. --Li Po

The peach trees blossom.
The water flows. --Li Po

The pen is only mighter than the sword at a range greater than five feet. --Principia Discordia

The people who live there now like to think of themselves as evil, but they're really no worse than anyone else. --Ellen Kushner

The perfect is the enemy of the good. --Ansel Adams

The pumpkin gives birth and the fence has the trouble. --Moroccan Proverb

The reverse side also has a reverse side. --Japanese Proverb

The right answer to a fool is silence. --Afghan Proverb

The right man comes at the right time. --Italian Proverb

The road never stops arriving. --Octavio Paz

The road to a friend's house is never long. --Danish Proverb

The roaring lion kills no game. --Tanzanian Proverb

The same fleece is often dyed in Tyrian cauldrons. --Ovid

The silent mouth is sweet to hear. --Celtic Proverb

The sky hurtled past, indifferent.

The spirit walks of every day deceased. --Edward Young

The stars are setting and the Caravan starts for the Dawn of Nothing. Oh, make haste! --Omar Khayyam

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move. --Douglas Adams

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels one gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath. Only the wind here hovers and revels. --Algernon Swinburne

The table is all laden: yellow cream, honeycomb, white bread and butter; roses at the window-sill and peeping round the shutter. --J. R. R. Tolkien

The Trosachs wound, as now, between gigantic walls of rock tapestried with broom and wild roses. --Thomas Macaulay

The truth is more important than the facts. --Frank Lloyd Wright

The truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing. --Lao-Tzu

The unblemished dawn came with its thousand cow faces. --Federico García Lorca

The upside-down experience described in the Egyptian underworld is nowhere better displayed than in the circus. --James Hillman

The vitality of thought is in adventure. --Alfred North Whitehead

The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel. --William Rounseville Alger

The wise man sits on the hole in his carpet. --Persian Proverb

Then o'er the close-barred house of clay, kind clematis and woodbine gay crept more and more. --Dinah Craik

There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them! --Padraic Pearse

There are some remedies worse than the disease. --Publilius Syrus

There is a way out of every shadowed mist over a rainbow trail. --Navajo Song

There is neither heaven nor earth, only snow, falling incessantly. --Hashin

There is no death, only a change of worlds. --Duwamish Proverb

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. --Douglas MacArthur

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. --Shakespeare

There shrines and palaces and towers resemble nothing that is ours. Around, by lifting winds forgot, the melancholy waters lie. --Edgar Allan Poe

There we shall not count the hours By the shadows as they pass. --Christina Rossetti

There were in all five order of intelligence which seems to have been cast out of Heaven, and some of them were incarnated as men. These were the giants of Genesis, the nephilim, the descendants of Amalek, the intruders of the Talmud... --Arthur Edward Waite

There's music in all things, if men had ears: their earth is but an echo of the spheres. --Lord Byron

There's still room for a lot of speculation as to whether elementals can have human incarnations. --Janine Renee

They fall to rise anew: seeds, rain, souls. --Alan Pert

Thicker than rain-drops on November thorn. --Samuel Coleridge

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. --T. S. Eliot

This peradventure, infamous for lies,
As on a rock of adamant we build
Our mountain hopes, spin out eternal schemes --Edward Young

Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. --Ursula LeGuin

Thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot of beechen green. --John Keats

Though a tree grows ever so high, the falling leaves return to the root. --Malayan Proverb

Three candles dispel the darkness; truth, knowledge and the ways of nature. --Celtic Proverb

Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like flakes --Sylvia Plath

Through the broad distance of the mountainous forest the sleek beast drifts. --Micah Ownbey

Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble the fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink. --Algernon Swinburne

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flys like a bannana. --Groucho Marx

Time is eternity; Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile.
Who murders Time, he crushes in the birth a power ethereal, only not adorn'd. --Edward Young

Tis builded in the leafless tracts and valleys huge of Tartarus. --Archibald Lampman

'Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours. --Edward Young

'Tis sweet to feel by what fine-spun threads our affections are drawn together. --Laurence Sterne

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. --Dante Rossetti

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest. --Mahatma Gandhi

To err is human, but is feels divine. --Mae West

To err is human, to forgive divine. --Alexander Pope

To love the king is not bad, but a king who loves you is better. --African Proverb

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. --Walt Whitman

To oppose something is to maintain it. --Ursula LeGuin

Too bitter-sweet, whose wakening should have been in Paradise. --Christina Rossetti

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genii. --Puzant Kevork Thomajan

Trust in Allah, but tie your camel. --Muslim Proverb

Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart. --Johann von Schiller

Tugging on shoots won't help them grow. --Chinese Proverb

Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul. --John Keats

Two birds, one of them mortal, the other immortal, live in the same tree. --Upanishads

Upon a pastoral slope as fair, and looking to the South, and fed With honey’d rain and delicate air. --Alfred Tennyson

Vast mists cover the Five Lakes. Let me buy a red painted boat and carry you away. --Wu Tsao

Waiting, lonely and sightless, mere paper limning their souls from that colorless aching desert of nescience.

Walled round with rocks as an inland island, the ghost of a garden fronts the sea. --Algernon Swinburne

Wander together by the silver stream, When the soft grass-heads were all wet with dew. --Bliss Carman

War is the father of everything. --Heraclitus

Water and windmills, greenness, Islets green;-- Farmhouses that at anchor seem'd--in the inland sky --Samuel Coleridge

Water, wide water, greenness and green banks, And water seen-- --Samuel Coleridge

We are all related. --Lakota Proverb

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love. --Goethe

We can do no great things; only small things with great love. --Mother Teresa

We can learn even from our enemies. --Ovid

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. --Carl Jung

We can't own this land. If anything, it owns us. --Warrunga

We have met the enemy and he is us. --Walt Kelly

What does not destroy me, makes me strong. --Friedrich Nietzsche

What is the source of sadness, but feebleness of the mind? --Akhenaton

What sand can resist Wave's teasing magic?

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos. --Kerry Thornley

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. --Mahatma Gandhi

When a man says yes, his soul says yes also. --African Proverb

When ideas fail, words come in very handy. --Goethe

When spring comes the grass grows by itself. --Lao-Tzu

...when the great oleanders were in flower in the broad herded meadows full of sun. --Bliss Carman

When the sky falls we'll catch larks. --Irish Proverb

When the water rises, hurry to get some. --Thai Proverb

When the way comes to an end, then change. --I Ching

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you. --African Proverb

When we consider the House of Hades, we must remember that the myths tell us that there is no time in the underworld. There is no decay, no progress, no change of any sort. --James Hillman

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. --Tom Stoppard

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. --Thich Nhat Hanh

Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing. --John Locke

Where blood-black bromelias, lichens, owls, and the lint of the waterfalls cling, familiar, unbidden. --Elizabeth Bishop

Where does the ant die except in sugar? --Malayan Proverb

...where the Hermit hangs the straw-clad cell, emerging gently from the leafy dell. --Gilbert White

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground. --Oscar Wilde

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right. --Henry Ford

White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee --Christina Rossetti

Whiter than the snow and salt crystals
The flora of the night opens its petals --Robert Desnos

Who gossips to you will gossip of you. --Turkish Proverb

Who is as a worm in my lord's kingly way? --Algernon Swinburne

Who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry thirsty roots? --Christina Rossetti

Who looks outside, dreams; Who looks inside, awakes. --Carl Jung

Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Why lie when there are so many ways to tell the truth? --Stig Jarrel

Wide is the door of a little cottage. --Irish Proverb

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. --William Cowper

Wisdom is to put aside the unimportant things in life. --Chinese Proverb

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim and purple-stained mouth. --John Keats

With delicate spire and whorl, How exquisitely minute, A miracle of design! --Alfred Tennyson

With her postures and careful expressions, she was like a series of china figurines displayed along a chronological shelf. --Ellen Kushner

Would you rather be right than happy? --Jerry Jampolsky

Years steal Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb, and life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. --Lord Byron

Yet if each dream is a step into the underworld, then remembering the dream
is a recollection of death and opens a frightening crevice under our feet. --James Hillman

You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest, and I smile. --Li Po

You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much. --Tove Jansson

You have to laugh at yourself, cause you'd cry your eyes out if you didn't. --Indigo Girls

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. --Walt Whitman

You live and you learn -- or you don't live long. --Robert A. Heinlein

You make it weaver of the etherial light,
Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time --
Why, still 'tis Being looking from the dark. --George Eliot

You may hear that your heartbeat is uneven and let new tension climb around your shoulders. --Annie Finch

Your blood will listen, like a charm. --Annie Finch

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass. --Dante Rossetti

Your "hungry soul" laps at the page with its "burning, burning." --Annie Finch

Your shadow is laughing. --Japanese Proverb

Ziegler raises the unromantic question: perhaps nature means to harm us, even finally to kill us. --James Hillman