William Carlos Williams Quotes

One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

A new music is a new mind.

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

A new world is only a new mind.

The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness

In summer, the song sings itself.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What power has love but forgiveness?

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.