Authors
May Sarton Quotes
Best Quotes by May Sarton (Top 10)
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We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
May Sarton -
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
May Sarton -
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton -
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
May Sarton -
In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing—the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
May Sarton -
A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton -
At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.
May Sarton -
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
May Sarton -
Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton -
True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
May Sarton
More May Sarton Quotes
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Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton -
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
May Sarton -
I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton -
May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.
May Sarton -
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.
May Sarton -
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton -
Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!
May Sarton -
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
May Sarton -
It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
May Sarton -
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
May Sarton -
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
May Sarton -
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
May Sarton -
The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
May Sarton -
If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.
May Sarton -
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton -
A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.
May Sarton -
Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton