ten e. e. cummings quotes to teach you a thing or two about living

I could read nonfiction books and textbooks all day long. But sometimes nothing makes me reflect as much as a few thoughts and words on life. It inspires me to pick up a pen and write, to look at the small moments with great passions, and to seize and opportunity when it’s staring you in the face. Dramatic maybe, but they still do the trick when you need something a little deeper than your usual fix of reading, TV, or music.   You could be the person, like me, to find a quick dose of inspiration in poet, painter, playwright, and essayist …

Francesca Contreras –
Book Culture
Life Quotes

I could read nonfiction books and textbooks all day long. But sometimes nothing makes me reflect as much as a few thoughts and words on life. It inspires me to pick up a pen and write, to look at the small moments with great passions, and to seize and opportunity when it’s staring you in the face. Dramatic maybe, but they still do the trick when you need something a little deeper than your usual fix of reading, TV, or music.

 

You could be the person, like me, to find a quick dose of inspiration in poet, painter, playwright, and essayist E.E. Cummings. From his poems laced with humanity and vulnerability to his words full of power, you will feel something. A mix of strength and truth are sure to fill your heart and mind.

 

1. To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

 

2. For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It’s always our self we find in the sea.

 

3. We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside 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.

 

4. I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness

 

5. I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

 

6. I do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses

 

7. …remember one thing only: that it’s you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.

 

8. Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

 

9. May my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living

 

10. Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who’ll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam’s architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand.
 
 

via GIPHY

 

Feature Image Via Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash