e. e. cummings Quotes (49 Quotes)

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

It takes three to make a child.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

maggie and millie and molly and maymaggie and millie and molly and maywent down to the beach (to play one day)and maggie discovered a shell that sangso sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,andmillie befriended a stranded starwho's rays five languid fingers wereand molly was chased by a horrible thingwhich raced sideways while blowing bubblesandmay came home with a smooth round stoneas small as a world and as large as alone.For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

when god decided to inventeverything he took onebreath bigger than a circustentand everything began.

Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most people

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows.Here is the root of the root and the bud of the budAnd the sky of the sky of a tree called lifeWhich grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide.And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.I carry your heart.I carry it in my heart.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Nothing recedes like progress.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

You are my sun,my moon,and all my stars.

Sweet springtime is my time is your time is our time for springtime is love time and viva sweet love.

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.EasyOf courseyou paint flowers and girls and sunsets things that everybody understands.I never met him.WhoEverybody.Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational paintingI am.Pardon meI am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational.Not all painting.No housepainting is representational.And what does a housepainter representTen dollars an hour.In other words, you dont want to be seriousIt takes two to be serious.

I don't know what it is about you that closes and opensonly something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all the roses.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my ''poems'' are competing.

Who knows if the moon's a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky filled with pretty people

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

Be of love a little more careful than of anything.

Art is a mystery.A mystery is something immeasurable.In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive nothing which is not alive can be art nothing which cannot be art is true and everything untrue doesnt matter a very good God damn...

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.

Why do you paint; For exactly the same reason I breathe. Thats not an answer. There isnt any answer. How long hasnt there been any answer; As long as I can remember. And how long have you written; As long as I can remember. I mean poetry. So do I.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

when man determined to destroyhimself he picked the wasof shall and finding only whysmashed it into because.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

Progress is a comfortable disease.

A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

All ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.

To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

The earth laughs in flowers.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.