Quote

A mind too active is no mind at all.

Theodore Roethke

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Intelligence
Mind
Intuition
Active

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

Image
I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
Theodore Roethke
Image
What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
Image
How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
Image
I have gone into the waste lonely places
Theodore Roethke
Image
When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
Theodore Roethke
Image
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke
Image
So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
Theodore Roethke
Image
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
Theodore Roethke
Image
A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
Theodore Roethke
Image
Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still calledThe flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollowsAnd love, love sang toward.
Theodore Roethke
Image
I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
Image
The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
Theodore Roethke
Image
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
Image
The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
Theodore Roethke
Image
And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
Theodore Roethke
Image
By daily dying, I have come to be.
Theodore Roethke
Image
Being, not doing, is my first joy.
Theodore Roethke
Image
But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
Theodore Roethke
Image
Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
Theodore Roethke
Image
In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
Theodore Roethke