110+ Marianne Moore Quotes On Education, Beauty And Insecurity

Marianne Moore was an American modernist poet and writer. She was known for her precise and witty poetry that often featured an ironic tone and subtle humor. She was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1951 and was appointed a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Marianne Moore on love, education, life.

Top 10 Marianne Moore Quotes

1. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
2. Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
3. Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
4. Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.
5. Omissions are not accidents.
6. The hands are the heart's messengers.
7. The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
8. When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.
9. A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
10. The heart that gives, gathers.

Marianne Moore Short Quotes

• The mind is an enchanting thing.
• The power of the visible is the invisible.
• Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
• The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.
• Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.
• It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
• Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
• As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
• We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave.
• I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

Marianne Moore Quotes About Life

Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it. — Marianne Moore

The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them. — Marianne Moore

Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this. — Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore Quotes About Beauty

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time. — Marianne Moore

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion? — Marianne Moore

Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty; / its existence is too much; / it tears one to pieces / and each fresh wave of consciousness / is poison. — Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore Quotes About Poetry

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it. — Marianne Moore

Poetry is all nouns and verbs. — Marianne Moore

Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity. — Marianne Moore

What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it. — Marianne Moore

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. — Marianne Moore

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination. — Marianne Moore

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry. — Marianne Moore

Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise — Marianne Moore

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry. — Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore Quotes About People

Superior people never make long visits. — Marianne Moore

My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard." — Marianne Moore

Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people. — Marianne Moore

My father used to say superior people never make long visits. — Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore Famous Quotes And Sayings

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express. — Marianne Moore

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized. — Marianne Moore

If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze. — Marianne Moore

The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion. — Marianne Moore

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back. — Marianne Moore

Unconfusion submits its confusion to proof; it's not a Herod's oath that cannot change. — Marianne Moore

I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false. — Marianne Moore

I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure. — Marianne Moore

One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be. — Marianne Moore

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity. — Marianne Moore

Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? — Marianne Moore

[The] whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so much confusion. — Marianne Moore

At all events there is in Brooklyn something that makes me feel at home. — Marianne Moore

Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible. — Marianne Moore

Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt. — Marianne Moore

O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon! — Marianne Moore

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try. — Marianne Moore

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish. — Marianne Moore

We are suffering from too much sarcasm. — Marianne Moore

What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe. — Marianne Moore

It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death. — Marianne Moore

When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment. — Marianne Moore

the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness. — Marianne Moore

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber. — Marianne Moore

They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene. — Marianne Moore

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. — Marianne Moore

Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. — Marianne Moore

that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder. — Marianne Moore

the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. — Marianne Moore

Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner. — Marianne Moore

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man. — Marianne Moore

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist. — Marianne Moore

A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague. — Marianne Moore

Your thorns are the best part of you. — Marianne Moore

One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment. — Marianne Moore

The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself. — Marianne Moore

What is there in being able to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of self-defense; in proving that one has had the experience of carrying a stick? — Marianne Moore

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed. — Marianne Moore

Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers. — Marianne Moore

You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief. — Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine. — Marianne Moore

Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence! — Marianne Moore

So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths. — Marianne Moore

When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art. — Marianne Moore

Victory won't come to me unless I go to it; a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times — Marianne Moore

There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman; and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious. — Marianne Moore

The deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled shoes! Denmark's sanctuaried Jews! — Marianne Moore

Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me. — Marianne Moore

When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use. — Marianne Moore

The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, "Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul." — Marianne Moore

You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man. — Marianne Moore

the small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise — Marianne Moore

Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin. — Marianne Moore

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile. — Marianne Moore

he who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter. — Marianne Moore

I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time. — Marianne Moore

All are / naked, none is safe. — Marianne Moore

Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister. — Marianne Moore

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go. — Marianne Moore

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds. — Marianne Moore

We prove, we do not explain, our birth. — Marianne Moore

There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war. — Marianne Moore

... we do not admire what we cannot understand. — Marianne Moore

Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. — Marianne Moore

Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty. — Marianne Moore

We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory. — Marianne Moore

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it — Marianne Moore

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind. — Marianne Moore

Writing is an undertaking for the modest. — Marianne Moore

Revision is its own reward. — Marianne Moore

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it. — Marianne Moore

Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness. — Marianne Moore

Life Lessons by Marianne Moore

1. Marianne Moore encourages us to be courageous and take risks in life, even if it means going against the grain. She also teaches us to stay true to our own values and beliefs, and to never give up on our dreams. Finally, she reminds us to be kind to others and to always strive for excellence in our work.