• Roger McGough

    Let me die a young man’s death

    Let me die a youngman’s death
    not a clean and inbetween
    the sheets holywater death
    not a famous-last-words
    peaceful out of breath death

    When I’m 73
    and in constant good humour
    may I be mown down at dawn
    by a bright red sports car
    on my way home
    from an allnight party

    Or when I’m 91
    with silver hair
    and sitting in a barber’s chair
    may rival gangsters
    with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
    and give me a short back and insides

    Or when I’m 104
    and banned from the Cavern
    may my mistress
    catching me in bed with her daughter
    and fearing for her son
    cut me up into little pieces
    and throw away every piece but one

    Let me die a youngman’s death
    not a free from sin tiptoe in
    candle wax and waning death
    not a curtains drawn by angels borne
    ‘what a nice way to go’ death

  • Robert Graves

    Flying Crooked

    The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
    (His honest idiocy of flight)
    Will never now, it is too late,
    Master the art of flying straight,
    Yet has- who knows so well as I?-
    A just sense of how not to fly:
    He lurches here and here by guess
    And God and hope and hopelessness.
    Even the acrobatic swift
    Has not his flying-crooked gift.

  • Richard Feynman

    But I would like not to underestimate the value of the world view which is the result of scientific effort. We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck – half of us upside down – by a mysterious attraction to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.

  • Ernest Hemingway

    Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

  • Lewis Carroll

    Jabberwocky

    ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
    All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

    ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
    The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
    Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
    The frumious Bandersnatch!’

    He took his vorpal sword in hand:
    Long time the manxome foe he sought —
    So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
    And stood a while in thought.

    And, as in uffish thought he stood,
    The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
    Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
    And burbled as it came!

    One two! One two! And through and through
    The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
    He left it dead, and with its head
    He went galumphing back.

    ‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
    Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
    Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
    He chortled in his joy.

    ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
    All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

  • Saint Augustine

    If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.

  • Ambrose Bierce

    Alone

    In contact, lo! the flint and steel,
    By sharp and flame, the thought reveal
    That he the metal, she the stone,
    Had cherished secretly alone.

  • Sydney Smith

    You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.

  • G K Chesterton

    Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

  • Sheenagh Pugh

    Sometimes

    Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
    from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
    faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
    Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

    A people sometimes will step back from war,
    elect an honest man, decide they care
    enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
    Some men become what they were born for.

    Sometimes our best intentions do not go
    amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
    The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
    that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

  • Brendan Francis

    If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don’t hoard it. Don’t dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke.

  • Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Music, when Soft Voices die

    Music, when soft voices die,
    Vibrates in the memory;
    Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
    Live within the sense they quicken.

    Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
    Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
    And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
    Love itself shall slumber on.

  • R W Emerson

    It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

  • E E Cummings

    when god decided to invent
    everything he took one
    breath bigger than a circustent
    and everything began

    when man determined to destroy
    himself he picked the was
    of shall and finding only why
    smashed it into because

  • Piet Hein

    The Road To Wisdom

    The road to wisdom? — Well, it’s plain
    and simple to express:
    Err
    and err
    and err again
    but less
    and less
    and less.

  • G K Chesterton

    The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

  • B R Bertramson

    It is disconcerting to reflect on the number of students we have flunked for not knowing what we later found to be untrue.

  • W. H. Davies

    Leisure

    WHAT is this life if, full of care,
    We have no time to stand and stare?-

    No time to stand beneath the boughs,
    And stare as long as sheep and cows:

    No time to see, when woods we pass,
    Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

    No time to see, in broad daylight,
    Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

    No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
    And watch her feet, how they can dance:

    No time to wait till her mouth can
    Enrich that smile her eyes began?

    A poor life this if, full of care,
    We have no time to stand and stare.