• Paul Valery

    The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

  • Christopher Logue

    Poem

    If the night flights keep you awake
    I will call London Airport and tell them
    to land their dangerous junk elsewhere.

    And if you fall asleep with the sleeve
    of my jacket under your head,
    sooner than wake you, I’ll cut it off.

    But if you say:
    ‘Fix me a plug on this mixer’,
    I grumble and take my time.

  • Horace

    They change their clime, not their disposition, who run across the sea.

  • Rabindranath Tagore

    Stray Birds

    Stray birds of summer come to my
    window to sing and fly away.
    And yellow leaves of autumn, which
    have no songs, flutter and fall
    there with a sigh.

  • John Dryden

    Happy The Man

    Happy the man, and happy he alone,
    He who can call today his own:
    He who, secure within, can say,
    Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
    Be fair or foul or rain or shine
    The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
    Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
    But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

  • T E Hulme

    Above the Dock

    Above the quiet dock in midnight,
    Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
    Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
    Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

  • Fred Trueman

    Batsman (having just been clean bowled): That was one hell of a ball, Fred.
    Fred Trueman: Ay, it were wasted on thee.

  • Winston Churchill

    There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.

  • Robert Herrick

    Delight in Disorder

    A sweet disorder in the dress
    Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
    A lawn about the shoulders thrown
    Into a fine distraction :
    An erring lace which here and there
    Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
    A cuff neglectful, and thereby
    Ribbons to flow confusedly :
    A winning wave (deserving note)
    In the tempestuous petticoat :
    A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
    I see a wild civility :
    Do more bewitch me than when art
    Is too precise in every part.

  • R S Thomas

    Play

    Jocosity
    through verbosity
    can lead to animosity

    as an attitude
    from exacitude
    can become a platitude

    Complementarity
    leads not with majority
    to popularity

    as scrupulosity
    has the capacity
    to encourage pomposity.

    Belief in the Trinity
    for most of humanity
    suggests a nonentity

    I fear theology
    is just an allergy
    of anthropology

    Heigh-ho that the universe
    through over-rehearsal
    should become farcical.

    Relativity
    in the face of gravity
    is incivility.

    In a Calvinist’s heaven,
    where no foot is cloven,
    who are the forgiven?

    Time does not prevaricate.
    Where the heart pontificates
    the questions proliferate.

    Is not astrology
    disguised as the economy
    the human pathology?

    One could go on and on
    like traffic in London –
    It is late. I have done.

  • Spike Milligan

    Things that go ‘bump’ in the night
    Should not really give one a fright.
    It’s the hole in each ear
    That lets in the fear,
    That, and the absence of light!

  • Fred Allen

    A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 pm to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

  • Pete Seeger

    Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t.

  • Henry Van Dyke

    Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.

  • Carol Ann Duffy

    The Light Gatherer

    When you were small, your cupped palms
    each held a candleworth under the skin,
    enough light to begin,

    and as you grew,
    light gathered in you, two clear raindrops
    in your eyes,

    warm pearls, shy,
    in the lobes of your ears, even always
    the light of a smile after your tears.

    Your kissed feet glowed in my one hand,
    or I’d enter a room to see the corner you played in
    lit like a stage set,

    the crown of your bowed head spotlit.
    When language came, it glittered like a river,
    silver, clever with fish,

    and you slept
    with the whole moon held in your arms for a night light
    where I knelt watching.

    Light gatherer. You fell from a star
    into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside
    mirrored in you,

    and now you shine like a snowgirl,
    a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder
    you squeal at and fly in,

    like a jewelled cave,
    turquoise and diamond and gold, opening out
    at the end of a tunnnel of years.