Authors — Quotes

E.E. Cummings Quotes: 32

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),It's always our self we find in the sea.
100 Selected Poems
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
I will take the sun in my mouthand leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyesto dash against darkness
Poems, 1923-1954
Lovers alone wear sunlight.
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.
Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: - you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
listen: there’s a hellof a good universe next door; let’s go
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...
may came home with a smooth round stoneas small as a world and as large as alone.
life's not a paragraphAnd death i think is no parenthesis
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)
Selected Poems
twice I have lived forever in a smile
a wind has blown the rain away & the sky away & all the leaves away, & the trees stand. i think i, too, have known autumn too long.
And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again.
i do not know what it is about you that closesand opens;only something in me understandsthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
since the thing perhaps isto eat flowers and not to be afraid
Complete Poems, 1904-1962
when man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because
100 Selected Poems
You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.
...remember one thing only: that it's you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.
Humanity i love you because youare perpetually putting the secret oflife in your pants and forgettingit's there and sitting downon itand because you areforever making poems in the lapof death Humanityi hate you
Such was a poet and shall be and is-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.
down with hell and heaven and all the religious fussinfinity pleased our parents one inch looks good to us
Always it’s Spring)and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves.
100 Selected Poems
Who can tell truth from falsehood any more?I say it, and you feel it in your hearts:no man or woman on this big small earth.How should our sages miss the mark of life,and our most skillful players lose the game?your hearts will tell you, as my heart has told me:because all know, and no one understands.
for whenever men are right they are not young
22 and 50 Poems by e. e. cummings
I am an i poet.