Quote

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

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
Learn
Imaginatively
Fear
Tragic
Experience
Experiences
Helping
Learned
Thing
Learning
People
Simply
Nations
Help

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.
May Sarton
Image
He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.
May Sarton
Image
Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.
May Sarton
Image
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton
Image
making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.
May Sarton
Image
Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton
Image
In the garden the door is always open into the holy - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
May Sarton
Image
Your poems will happen when no one is there.
May Sarton
Image
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
May Sarton
Image
More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.
May Sarton
Image
I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
May Sarton
Image
Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
May Sarton
Image
True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton
Image
One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
May Sarton
Image
Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.
May Sarton
Image
An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
May Sarton
Image
Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
May Sarton
Image
Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
May Sarton
Image
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
May Sarton
Image
It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.
May Sarton