Poem The Divine Quotes & Sayings

Homer then has the bard - a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people" - say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine — Adam Nicolson

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin ... if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live? ... then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ... — Tom Stoppard

imagine the desert
mothers, with hair tangled
tighter than their theology
and breasts that flowed milk
and mystic wisdom. they
knew how to draw the singing
sigils in the sand, how to dig
rough and bitten fingers
into desiccated dirt for water
to wet the lips of their young.

women of hips and heft, who
learned how to burn
beneath the wild and searing
sun, who made loud love
against the star-flecked threat
of night, who knew that strength
is not always a matter of muscle.

imagine your ancestresses,
the prophetesses of the arid
lands, before these starched
traditions and pews too hard
to pray from, who bled true
ritual and birthed their own fierce
souls at creation's crowning -- — Beth Morey

Radio is a really strange business now, too. There's a very narrow door and a very few people control what gets played. — Taylor Hanson

HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION

I am born as the sun,
But then turn into the moon,
As my blonde hairs turn
Grayish-white and fall
To the ground,
Only to be buried again,
Then to be born again,
Into a thousand suns
And a thousand
Moons.

Suzy Kassem — Suzy Kassem

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist.
Pink dragonflies fall from the air
and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks.
The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter.
Like the smile of a child separated
from his mother's milk for the very first time.
from poem Blood and Blossoms — Aberjhani

North Carolina needs to revamp the tax code completely. We have some of the highest tax rates, like the corporate tax rate, in the country. — David Rouzer

I finally went
where everyone goes
and I realized
I was
never
missing
out. — Meraaqi

Beneath her curls, I forget the world,
With a mere gaze she raises my hopes of gold.
Love is as much in her heart as in mine,
But she doesn't say it, her punishment so divine. — Faraaz Kazi

I know her by heart, and that doesn't make me love her any less. Like a Dante scholar who learns the entire Divine Comedy and then just appreciates the poem even more profoundly. — Fausto Brizzi

perhaps the greatest poem ever written — Rod Dreher

If a work of art is placed before me, I believe I can enjoy it; but I do not overlook the fact, that Art is one thing, another thing Amusement; and that people do like amusements, and will run after it. — George Henry Lewes

I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.

They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself. — Meraaqi

He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy. — Charles Frazier

I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and

my words are a whisper
my words are a howl

I will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She.

I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted. — Beth Morey

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. — Ben Lerner

About novel Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott.
Q: What does the title "Imperfect Birds" mean?
It's a line from a poem by Rumi. The line is "Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds", and it's really about how these kind of scraggly, raggedy nests that are our lives are the sanctuary for other people to step into, and that if you want to see the divine, you really step into the absolute ordinary. When you're at your absolutely most lost and dejected ... where do you go? You go to the nests left by other imperfect birds, you find other people who've gone through it. You find the few people you can talk to about it.
from Writer's Digest May/June 2010 — Anne Lamott

I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. — Elizabeth Gilbert

You probably don't hit as many fairway-bunker shots as you do the greenside ones, and that unfamiliarity might make you a bit nervous. — Ernie Els

Inferno is the underworld as described in Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy, which portrays hell as an elaborately structured realm populated by entities known as "shades" - bodiless souls trapped between life and death. — Dan Brown

The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer. — Alfred Whitney Griswold

And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not... through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and raptorous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. — Edgar Allan Poe

Many Castles
On
My
Travels
i have been
A guest in
Many castles
Yet the
Monument
Which i
Find
Divine
Is the oasis
Where the heart
And the silence
Intertwine. — Silent Lotus

You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dali spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous! — Salvador Dali

When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose. — James A. Garfield

we have forgotten how to press our fingers
to the tilting planet's jugular and measure
her pulse. we have forgotten symbiosis,
that she is our mother.

we have forgotten that when we rape
our world we rape ourselves. — Beth Morey

I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?

Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows. — Meraaqi

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning. — Michel De Montaigne

I heard it stated that, on one occasion, during one of Alastair's visits to his friend "Mr Lachlan," the famous divine requested the bard to compose a poem on the "Resurrection of Christ." To this he demurred and told Mr Lachlan in Gaelic that "he knew more about such matters himself, and should try his own hand — Various

Lord. As Blake brought out so beautifully in his poem "Jerusalem": ". . . Babel mocks, saying there is no God or Son of God; That Thou, O Human Imagination, O Divine Body of the Lord Jesus Christ art all A delusion; but I know Thee, O Lord, when Thou arisest upon My weary eyes, even in this dungeon and this iron mill. . . For Thou also sufferest with me, although I behold Thee not. . ." . . .And the Divine Voice answers: ". . . Fear not! Lo, I am with you always. Only believe in me, that I have power to raise from death Thy Brother who sleepeth in Albion. — Neville Goddard

The strange and wonderful Book of Job treats of the same subject as we are discussing; its contents are a fiction, conceived for the purpose of explaining the different opinions which people hold on Divine Providence ... This fiction, however, is in so far different from other fictions that it includes profound ideas and great mysteries, removes great doubts, and reveals the most important truths. I will discuss it as fully as possible; and I will also tell you the words of our Sages that suggested to me the explanation of this great poem. — Maimonides

Oxford

It is well that there are palaces of peace
And discipline and dreaming and desire,
Lest we forget our heritage and cease
The Spirit's work - to hunger and aspire:

Lest we forget that we were born divine,
Now tangled in red battle's animal net,
Murder the work and lust the anodyne,
Pains of the beast 'gainst bestial solace set.

But this shall never be: to us remains
One city that has nothing of the beast,
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire's glutted feast.

We are not wholly brute. To us remains
A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,
A place of visions and of loosening chains,
A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.

She was not builded out of common stone
But out of all men's yearning and all prayer
That she might live, eternally our own,
The Spirit's stronghold - barred against despair. — C.S. Lewis

No, never mind, I didn't think so. Mead, Dante's theme is man-not a man.' Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. "The Italians forever twitch at Dante's sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante's Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10 — Matthew Pearl

The less I was of who I was, the better I felt. — Leonard Cohen

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry. — W.S. Merwin