Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates...

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Author: A fool, who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting the generations to come.

Nothing but blackness aboveAnd nothing that moves but the cars...God, if you wish for our love,Fling us a handful of stars! - Caliban in the Coal Mines.

You, the Spirit of the Settlement! ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries... - Melting Pot, The.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.

You can't teach a hunter it's wrong to kill.

I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one -- one for all men and for all occupations.

The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

An understanding heart is everything is a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with bad.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

First he wrought, and afterward he taught.

'Tis an old saying, the Devil lurks behind the cross. All is not gold that glitters. From the tail of the plough, Bamba was made King of Spain; and from his silks and riches was Rodrigo cast to be devoured by the snakes. - Don Quixote.