My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends – it gives a lovely light!
The soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.
Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird’s wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
There is no shelter in you anywhere.
I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.
Cruel of heart, lay down my song. Your reading eyes have done me wrong. Not for you was the pen bitten, And the mind wrung, and the song written.
Beauty is whatever gives joy.
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink.
Not for the flag Of any land because myself was born there Will I give up my life. But I will love that land where man is free, And that will I defend.
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
I am all the time talking about you, and bragging, to one person or another. I am like the Ancient Mariner, who had a tale in his heart he must unfold to all. I am always buttonholing somebody and saying, “Someday you must meet my mother.”
The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief or grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw, – it must have been Very pretty.
Not Truth, but Faith it is that keeps the world alive.
Earth does not understand her child, Who from the loud gregarious town Returns, depleted and defiled, To the still woods, to fling him down.
And all the loveliest things there be come simply, so it seems to me.
I have loved badly, loved the great Too soon, withdrawn my words too late; And eaten in an echoing hall Alone and from a chipped plate The words that I withdrew too late.
I love humanity but I hate people.