Quote

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.

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
Growing
Artist
Keep
Whole
Would
Stopped
Somewhere
Failure
Duty

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.
May Sarton
Image
each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
May Sarton
Image
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
Image
For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
May Sarton
Image
Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
Image
I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.
May Sarton
Image
I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
May Sarton
Image
If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.
May Sarton
Image
Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.
May Sarton
Image
The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
May Sarton
Image
Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
May Sarton
Image
I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
May Sarton
Image
I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.
May Sarton
Image
all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
May Sarton
Image
I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).
May Sarton
Image
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
May Sarton
Image
We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
May Sarton
Image
It takes a long time for words to become thought.
May Sarton
Image
The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
May Sarton
Image
The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.
May Sarton