Best 42 quotes of John Ciardi on MyQuotes

A carbonated wine foisted upon Americans (who else would drink it?) by winery ad agencies as a way of getting rid of inferior champagne by mixing it with inferior burgundy.

A dollar saved is a quarter earned.

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.

Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we're not free spenders- doesn't know our like.

Boys are the cash of war.

Conviction is possible only in a world more primitive than ours can be perceived to be. A man can achieve a simply gnomic conviction only by ignoring the radical describers of his environment, or by hating them, as convinced men have hated, say, Darwin and Freud, as agents of some devil.

Early to bed and early to rise probably indicates unskilled labor.

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

Fermentation equals civilization.

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

I have one head that wants to be good, And one that wants to be bad. And always, as soon as I get up, One of my heads is sad.

I'm smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.

It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their conviction. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their convictions.

Let our love be like an arch- two weaknesses leaning together to form one strength.

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.

One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile Coiled and gleaming to the end of space And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds To the last tooth of time, and the case closed.

Patience is the art of caring slowly.

Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.

The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.

The day will happen whether or not you get up.

The public library is the most dangerous place in town

There's nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.

Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

You have to fall in love with hanging around words.

And the time sundials tell May be minutes and hours. But it may just as well Be seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers. No, I don't think of time as just minutes and hours. Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles, Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files (They do move like seconds—just watch their feet go: Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). You'll learn as you grow That whatever there is in a garden, the sun Counts up on its dial. By the time it is done Our sundial—or someone's— will certainly add All the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad. And if anyone's here for the finish, the sun Will have told him—by sundial—how well we have done. How well we have done, or how badly. Alas, That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass.

He had his choice, and he liked the worst.

There was a young lady from Gloucester Who complained that her parents both bossed her, So she ran off to Maine. Did her parents complain? Not at all -- they were glad to have lost her.

Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.