William Carlos Williams
One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.Collection: Optimistic
It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.Collection: Lying
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.Collection: Men
Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.Collection: Thinking
The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.Collection: Jobs
First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.Collection: Smell
A poem is a small machine made out of words.Collection: Machines
Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.Collection: Discovery
The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.Collection: Love
We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.Collection: Eye
A new world is only a new mind.Collection: Responsibility
As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.Collection: Reality
Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadlinessCollection: Mind
It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.Collection: Sweaters
The only realism in art is of the imagination.Collection: Art
The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.Collection: Business
Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.Collection: Love
In summer, the song sings itself.Collection: Summer
What power has love but forgiveness?Collection: Forgiveness
There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.Collection: Order
I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.Collection: Art
It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.Collection: Believe
The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.Collection: Spring
I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.Collection: Writing
The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades - Seven feet tall the dark, dried weed stalks make a part of the night a red lace on the milky blue skyCollection: Weed
O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.Collection: Next
You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.Collection: Fire
Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.Collection: Southern
Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!Collection: Sunset
Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note.Collection: Love Is
For there is a wind or a ghost of wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual.Collection: Book
At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.Collection: Love
the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.Collection: Citizens
For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.Collection: Anticipation
The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.Collection: Art
Without invention nothing is well-spaced.Collection: Invention
Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.Collection: Divorce
It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!Collection: Stars
By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.Collection: Clouds
Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.Collection: Loss
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.Collection: Blind
Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.Collection: Character
I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary.Collection: Artist
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.Collection: Spring
Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable.Collection: Mind
Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.Collection: Cat
No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.Collection: Flower