144 Poets' Inspiring Quotes

In a world where words have the power to move mountains and change lives, poetry stands as a beacon of expression, emotion, and inspiration. Whether it's through the graceful cadence of a sonnet or the raw intensity of free verse, poets have a unique ability to capture the essence of the human experience. Today, we invite you on a journey through the minds of some of the greatest poets ever known. Our curated collection of inspiring quotes from 144 remarkable poets offers a glimpse into the profound wisdom and creativity that have touched hearts and ignited imaginations for generations. Let their words inspire you, move you, and remind you of the beauty and power of poetry.

1. “Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.” - Anne Sexton

2. “The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.” - Jane Kenyon

3. “Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco: We got dressed and showed the houseYou live well the visitor saidThe slum must be inside you. If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..” - C.D. Wright

4. “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.” - Soren Kierkegaard

5. “I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.” - Pablo Neruda

6. “Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” - Jane Austen

7. “The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.” - James Baldwin

8. “Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

9. “Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.” - Robert Creeley

10. “Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.” - George Eliot

11. “Them lady poets must not marry, pal.” - John Berryman

12. “The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.” - Christopher Morley

13. “...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal?” - H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

14. “Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.” - Greg Bear

15. “The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought” - Arthur Rimbaud

16. “Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house” - William Gass

17. “We must listen to poets.” - Gaston Bachelard

18. “From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.” - Wallace Stevens

19. “Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.” - Wallace Stevens

20. “We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.” - Wallace Stevens

21. “With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.” - Gustave Flaubert

22. “Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.” - Kathy Skaggs

23. “Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.” - Dudley Moore

24. “On the last day of the worldI would want to plant a tree” - W. S. Merwin

25. “When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.” - Gustave Flaubert

26. “Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.” - Gustave Flaubert

27. “The little poets sing of little things:Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,And modest flowers waving in the sun.The mighty poets write in blood and tearsAnd agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.They reach their mad blind hands into the night,To plumb abysses dead to human sight;To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world. MUSINGS [click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]” - Robert E. Howard

28. “Poetry makes nothing happen.” - W.H. Auden

29. “The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.” - André Breton

30. “I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.” - Mary Karr

31. “Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?” - Wendell Berry

32. “One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.” - Helen Vendler

33. “. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.” - Major Jackson

34. “. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.” - A. E. Stallings

35. “Between roars the lion purrs.” - William Edgar Stafford

36. “The bats inebriate the sky . . .” - A. E. Stallings

37. “Therefore, since the world has stillMuch good, but much less good than ill,And while the sun and moon endureLuck's a chance, but trouble's sure,I'd face it as a wise man would,And train for ill and not for good.” - A. E. Housman

38. “Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.” - Annie Finch

39. “In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.” - Edward Carpenter

40. “A single wire hanger on a nail by itselfIsn't bad though a stack of them on a floorIs too gloomy for words.” - Dara Weir

41. “One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.” - Robert Hass

42. “It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .” - Lucia Perillo

43. “Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

44. “Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.” - Wendell Berry

45. “I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.” - Socrates

46. “It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.” - G.K. Chesterton

47. “The poet is much more the one who inspires,than the one who is inspired.” - Paul Eluard

48. “GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.” - Lisa Washington

49. “There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...” - Roger Cardinal

50. “Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.” - Samuel Beckett

51. “Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.” - Jess C. Scott

52. “An owl sound wandered along the road with me.I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.” - William Stafford

53. “The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

54. “I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it” - Marianne Moore

55. “A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.” - Søren Kierkegaard

56. “A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.” - Criss Jami

57. “Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuéesQui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.” - Charles Baudelaire

58. “When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.” - John Crowley

59. “You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived.” - Aberjhani

60. “. . . a racer snake / slicking off / like a signature into the weeds.” - Tony Crunk

61. “Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.” - Rollo May

62. “Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")” - John Collier

63. “A poem is a meteor.” - Wallace Stevens

64. “Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

65. “Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary olf bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about him--except instructors and their hapless students.” - Henry Blake Fuller

66. “I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they write poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems” - Forough Farrokhzad

67. “no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.” - W.H. Auden

68. “О любви мы знаем немного. Любовь - что груша. Она сладкая и имеет определенную форму. Но попробуйте дать определение формы груши!© Лютик "Полвека поэзии” - Sapkovsky A.

69. “I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?” - Mark Strand

70. “I bargained with Life for a penny, and Life would pay no more, However I begged at eveningWhen I counted my scanty store;Life is a just employer. He gives you what you ask,But once you have set the wages,Why, you must bear the task.I worked for a menial's hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have willingly paid” - Jessie B. Rittenhouse

71. “I pen you words from my heartneither paper nor pen would doas I lay them out in flowery fontswhat more could you ask foras I am writing in your heartthe love that I want to endureI am no Keats nor am I anyone but mea poetess longing for your touchget lost with me in my wordsas I serenade you with a forever quill.” - Chimnese Davids

72. “Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.” - Joseph Campbell

73. “I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.” - Evelyn Waugh

74. “The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.” - Dan Simmons

75. “The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.” - Dan Simmons

76. “It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.” - Mark Rothko

77. “I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.” - Peter Kreeft

78. “What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality.” - D.H. Lawrence

79. “...when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was...this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.” - Orhan Pamuk

80. “Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ’s body.” - Dejan Stojanovic

81. “The universe is God's son.” - Dejan Stojanovic

82. “Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.” - Dejan Stojanovic

83. “Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge.” - Dejan Stojanovic

84. “Darkness does not age; nothing is always nothing” - Dejan Stojanovic

85. “Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute.” - Dejan Stojanovic

86. “Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.” - Dejan Stojanovic

87. “Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.” - Dejan Stojanovic

88. “Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds.” - Dejan Stojanovic

89. “When following God, Zero we never find.” - Dejan Stojanovic

90. “Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.” - Dejan Stojanovic

91. “Universe is the Sun watching its own self.” - Dejan Stojanovic

92. “Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.” - Dejan Stojanovic

93. “God is busy and has no time for you.” - Dejan Stojanovic

94. “Get close to grass and you’ll see a star.” - Dejan Stojanovic

95. “The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.” - Dejan Stojanovic

96. “Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.” - Dejan Stojanovic

97. “Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.” - Dejan Stojanovic

98. “How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.” - Dejan Stojanovic

99. “Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.” - Dejan Stojanovic

100. “When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.” - Dejan Stojanovic

101. “We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.” - Dejan Stojanovic

102. “How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.” - Dejan Stojanovic

103. “How does one say something new and not retell?” - Dejan Stojanovic

104. “He did not profess to anybody how to reach others without professing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

105. “You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.” - Dejan Stojanovic

106. “Either you will be you or you will not be at all.” - Dejan Stojanovic

107. “We need knew knights, but without swords.” - Dejan Stojanovic

108. “Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.” - Dejan Stojanovic

109. “A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window.” - Dejan Stojanovic

110. “His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

111. “If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur.” - Dejan Stojanovic

112. “There are no winners in real games.” - Dejan Stojanovic

113. “You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.” - Dejan Stojanovic

114. “Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.” - Dejan Stojanovic

115. “Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.” - Dejan Stojanovic

116. “Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.” - Dejan Stojanovic

117. “Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.” - Dejan Stojanovic

118. “The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.” - Dejan Stojanovic

119. “What we call life is only talk of nature.” - Dejan Stojanovic

120. “It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.” - Dejan Stojanovic

121. “Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much.” - Dejan Stojanovic

122. “If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.” - Dejan Stojanovic

123. “Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.” - Dejan Stojanovic

124. “From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.” - Dejan Stojanovic

125. “Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.” - Dejan Stojanovic

126. “If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.” - Dejan Stojanovic

127. “Nobility is not only in forgiveness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

128. “Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan.” - Dejan Stojanovic

129. “Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.” - Dejan Stojanovic

130. “Without space, there is no time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

131. “Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

132. “There can be no forced inspiration.” - Dejan Stojanovic

133. “There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.” - Dejan Stojanovic

134. “Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.” - Dejan Stojanovic

135. “We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.” - Dejan Stojanovic

136. “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.” - Henry David Thoreau

137. “Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.” - Adrienne Rich

138. “Any society that produces twice as many lawyers as it does poets and preachers is doomed.” - John Fogarty

139. “My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” - Michelle Geaney

140. “The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.” - Helen Bevington

141. “That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them” - George Bernard Shaw

142. “[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)” - Pierre Reverdy

143. “What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.” - Denis de Rougemont

144. “At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.” - Aberjhani