E. E. Cummings Quotes

Time is a strange fellow, he gives more than he takes.. And he takes all.

E. E. Cummings (95 Poems, 1958)

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

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.

E. E. Cummings (A Poets Advice, 1958)

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

E. E. Cummings (Quoted in Wake Magazine, 1951)

Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That’s not an answer.
There isn’t any answer.
How long hasn’t 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.

E. E. Cummings

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Something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.

E. E. Cummings (W Viva, 1931)

No sunbeam ever lies.

E. E. Cummings (1 x 1, 1944)

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

E. E. Cummings (Is 5, 1926)

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

E. E. Cummings (Collected Poems, 1938)

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.

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

E. E. Cummings (Tulips and Chimneys, 1923)

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

E. E. Cummings

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel …the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

E. E. Cummings (A Poets Advice, 1958)

Life's not a paragraph, and death I think is no parenthesis.

E. E. Cummings (Is 5, 1926)

Love is a deeper season than reason.

E. E. Cummings (1 x 1, 1944)

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.

E. E. Cummings

We do not believe in ourselves until someone else reveals that deep inside of us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings