Top 100 Sarton Quotes
#1. Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
#2. I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time
except maybe when I'm making love.
May Sarton
#3. 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
#4. Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.
May Sarton
#5. [In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious ...
May Sarton
#6. My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!
May Sarton
#7. Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.
May Sarton
#8. What we have not has made us what we are.
Those surface consolations have to go.
May Sarton
#9. The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression ...
May Sarton
#10. What does myself now say to me?
Open the door of Mystery.
May Sarton
#11. One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.
May Sarton
#12. Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.
May Sarton
#13. I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.
May Sarton
#15. A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
May Sarton
#16. All great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
May Sarton
#17. Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have ... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!
May Sarton
#18. I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.
May Sarton
#19. Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
#20. I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.
May Sarton
#21. Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.
May Sarton
#22. The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.
May Sarton
#23. Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?
May Sarton
#24. She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.
May Sarton
#25. For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.
May Sarton
#26. And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.
May Sarton
#27. For only the ill are well,
Only the hunted, free
May Sarton
#28. I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sarton
#29. I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
#30. Women's work is always toward wholeness.
May Sarton
#31. Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
May Sarton
#32. I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.
May Sarton
#33. When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
May Sarton
#34. We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
May Sarton
#35. For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.
May Sarton
#36. It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.
May Sarton
#37. 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
#38. About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
May Sarton
#39. When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.
May Sarton
#40. Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May Sarton
#41. Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
May Sarton
#42. We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
May Sarton
#43. Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
May Sarton
#44. I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
May Sarton
#45. He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.
May Sarton
#46. From the humanistic point of view every human achievement is unforgettable and immortal in its essence, even if it is replaced by a "better" one.
George Sarton
#47. Time spent with poets is never wasted.
May Sarton
#48. Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe ...
May Sarton
#49. It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person ...
May Sarton
#50. Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets
they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
May Sarton
#51. It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.
May Sarton
#52. Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
May Sarton
#53. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
#54. In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
#55. An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
May Sarton
#56. I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.
May Sarton
#57. Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton
#58. You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love.
May Sarton
#59. My gratitude to them [my first teachers] grows as I myself grow older.
George Sarton
#60. When the petals fall
Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well
May Sarton
#61. For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
#62. We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
May Sarton
#63. 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
#64. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
May Sarton
#65. You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
May Sarton
#66. It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.
May Sarton
#67. There is only one real deprivation ... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.
May Sarton
#68. Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
May Sarton
#69. Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.
May Sarton
#70. I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.
May Sarton
#71. People who cannot feel punish those who do.
May Sarton
#72. It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
May Sarton
#73. They are commiting murder who merely live.
May Sarton
#74. There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper ...
May Sarton
#75. Letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.
May Sarton
#76. "How does one grow up?" I asked a friend. She answered, "By thinking!"
May Sarton
#77. The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable
May Sarton
#78. On the basis of my historical experience, I fully believe that mathematics of the 25th century will be as different from that of today as the latter is from that of the 16th century.
George Sarton
#79. I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
May Sarton
#80. Gardening is the instrument of grace.
May Sarton
#81. Have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.
May Sarton
#82. The most malicious kind of hatred is that which is built upon a theological foundation.
George Sarton
#83. A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
#84. Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer.
May Sarton
#85. It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to rest, even for a few hours.
May Sarton
#86. We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.
May Sarton
#87. At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.
May Sarton
#88. Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
May Sarton
#89. The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton
#90. We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
May Sarton
#91. We are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
May Sarton
#92. KAIROS A unique time in a person's life; an opportunity for change.
May Sarton
#93. For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
May Sarton
#94. My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
#95. Alive to the loving past She conjures her own. Nothing is wholly lost - Sun on the stone. And lilacs in their splendor Like lost friends Come back through grief to tell her Love never ends.
May Sarton
#96. I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.
May Sarton
#97. Greek culture is pleasant to contemplate because of its great simplicity and naturalness, and because of the absence of gadgets, each of which is sooner or later a cause of servitude.
George Sarton
#98. Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
May Sarton
#99. Wisdom is not mathematical, nor astronomical, nor zoological; when it talks too much of any one thing it ceases to be itself. There are wise physicists, but wisdom is not physical; there are wise physicians, but wisdom is not medical.
George Sarton
#100. When I am working I immediately feel hopeful.
May Sarton
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