Quote

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.

May Sarton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Destructive
Feelings
Others
Much
Always
Thinking
People
Hiding

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
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
Image
Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
May Sarton
Image
Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May Sarton
Image
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
Image
... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.
May Sarton
Image
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
Image
It takes a long time for words to become thought.
May Sarton
Image
making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.
May Sarton
Image
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine - why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity?
May Sarton
Image
It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
May Sarton
Image
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
Image
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
May Sarton
Image
It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.
May Sarton
Image
For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
May Sarton
Image
One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about
May Sarton
Image
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton