The Floating Library

Peaceful, Master, Are all the hours We lose if we place, As in a vase, Flowers on our Losing them. There are in our life No sorrows or joys. So let us learn, Wisely unworried, Not how to live life But to let it go by, Keeping forever Peaceful and calm, Taking children For our [...]

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I love the roses of Adonis’s gardens. Yes, Lydia, I love those wingèd roses, ………Which one day are born ………And on that day die. Light for them is eternal, since They are born after sunrise and end ………Before Apollo quits ………His visible journey. Let us also make our lives one day, Consciously forgetting there’s night, [...]

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The night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done. – Francis William Bourdillon

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If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. – Emily Dickinson

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To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate Or leave out any part of you. Be complete in each thing. Put all you are Into the least of your acts. So too in each lake, with its lofty life, The whole moon shines. – Ricardo Reis, 14 February 1933

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Calm because I’m unknown, And myself because I’m calm, I want to fill my days With wanting nothing from them. For those whom wealth touches, Gold irritates the skin. For those on whom fame blows, Life fogs over. On those for whom happiness Is their sun, night will fall. But those who hope for nothing [...]

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To think about God is to disobey God, Since God wanted us not to know him, Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us . . . Let’s be simple and calm, Like the trees and streams, And God will love us, making us Us even as the trees are trees And the streams [...]

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The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. – Carl Sandburg

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Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbow’d. Beyond this place of wrath and [...]

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And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to Blossom. – Anaïs Nin

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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just …….walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially [...]

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By John Shade . CANTO 1 . I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the [...]

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Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front ……door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling; (a young man like the one who curiously peeked through [...]

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