100 Quotes by E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings, whose real name was Edward Estlin Cummings, was an American poet renowned for his distinctive and innovative style. His poetry is characterized by its unconventional use of grammar, punctuation, and typography, which often defied the conventional norms of writing. Cummings' work delved into themes of love, individuality, and the human experience. His poems often embraced a playful yet profound exploration of language, where words were not just carriers of meaning but also visual and auditory elements.
His lowercase and fragmented writing style could be seen as a rebellion against societal norms, mirroring his belief in the importance of embracing one's unique identity. Through his poetry, Cummings encouraged readers to challenge the boundaries of language and thought, inviting them to discover new ways of perceiving and interacting with the world.
E. E. Cummings Quotes
Spring is like a perhaps hand (Meaning)
All in green went my love riding (Meaning)
Your homecoming will be my homecoming (Meaning)
A world of made is not a world of born (Meaning)
worms are the words but joy's the voice (Meaning)
An artist, a man, a failure, must proceed. (Meaning)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands (Meaning)
the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy (Meaning)
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. (Meaning)
To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. (Quote Meaning)
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star. (Meaning)
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. (Quote Meaning)
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit. (Meaning)
Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward. (Quote Meaning)
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. (Meaning)
I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. (Quote Meaning)
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. (Meaning)
Kisses are a better fate than wisdom. (Quote Meaning)
I imagine that yes is the only living thing. (Meaning)
To destroy is always the first step in any creation. (Quote Meaning)
Lovers alone wear sunlight. (Meaning)
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense. (Quote Meaning)
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. (Meaning)
Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go. (Quote Meaning)
Unbeing dead isn't being alive. (Meaning)
Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink. (Quote Meaning)
Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea.
The first step to expanding your reality is to discard the tendency to exclude things from possibility.
Remember one thing only: that it's you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.
Your head is a living forest full of songbirds. (Meaning)
Exists no miracle mightier than this: to feel. (Meaning)
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness,
You and I are more than you and I because it's we.
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
Because you aren't afraid to kiss the dirt (and consequently dare to climb the sky)
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
It's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful
And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart I carry your heart.
The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses (Meaning)
Someone asked me what home was and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your ribcage.
I'd rather have two good friends, than 500,000 admirers.
You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars. (Meaning)
And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. (Meaning)
The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.
I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains.
I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness
May my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living
May I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong.
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear.
Twice I have lived forever in a smile
Great men burn bridges before they come to them
Only by you my heart always moves. (Meaning)
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
I love you much most beautiful darling more than anyone on the earth and I like you better than everything in the sky.
The eyes of my eyes are opened. (Meaning)
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
Tumbling-hair picker of buttercups violets dandelions And the big bullying daisies through the field wonderful with eyes a little sorry Another comes also picking flowers
Do not hate or fear the artist in yourselves... Honor and love him...do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. Only the artist in yourself is more truthful than the night.
Sweet springtime is my time is your time is our time for springtime is love time and viva sweet love.
A poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being
Love is the whole and more than all. (Meaning)
Most people are perfectly afraid of silence (Meaning)
The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying 'anywhere but here'.
You shall above all things be glad and young For if you're young,whatever life you wear it will become you;and if you are glad whatever's living will yourself become.
You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.
An intelligent person fights for lost causes, realizing that others are merely effects
There is no music unless the drum and the drummer are one.
It takes three to make a child.
I carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart) (Meaning)
Somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence; in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near
Life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis (Meaning)
And it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
Laughing is just another way of showing people your wise
The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.
A pretty girl who is naked / is worth a million statues
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
Here's to opening and upward... and to yourself and up with you and up with and up with laughing.
May I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong today... may I be me....five foot eleven, brown hair/eyed, smart, serious, happy, frustrated, impatient, joyful, running, sleeping, smiling, eating, trying, believing, listening, being & becoming.
Be of love a little more careful than of anything. (Meaning)
Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.
A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.
Love is the every only god (Meaning)
Deeds cannot dream what dreams can do (Meaning)
We can never be born enough. (Meaning)
There's time for laughing and there's time for crying— for hoping for despair for peace for longing —a time for growing and a time for dying: a night for silence and a day for singing but more than all(as all your more than eyes tell me)there is a time for timelessness
One's not half two. It's two are halves of one. (Meaning)
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination. (Meaning)
To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.
-Before leaving my room i turn, and (stooping through the morning) kiss this pillow, dear where our heads lived and were.
Tomorrow is our permanent address. (Meaning)
The theory of the free press is not that the truth will be presented completely or perfectly in any one instance, but that the truth will emerge from free discussion
Your slightest look easily will unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers, you open petal by petal myself a Spring opens her first rose.
As small as a world as large as alone. (Meaning)
Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most people?
And the reason that I laugh and breathe is oh love
It may take two people to make a really beautiful mistake.
The hardest fight a man has to fight is to live in a world where every single day someone is trying to make you someone you do not want to be.
Progress is a comfortable disease. (Meaning)
Who can tell truth from falsehood any more? I say it, and you feel it in your hearts: no man or woman on this big small earth. How should our sages miss the mark of life, and our most skillful players lose the game? your hearts will tell you, as my heart has told me: because all know, and no one understands.
Who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you
So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.
Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.
May my heart always be open to little birds, who are the secrets of living. Whatever they sing is better than to know. And if men should not hear them - then men are old.
Nobody loses all the time. (Meaning)
Wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a far better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers.
Seeker of truth follow no path all paths lead where truth is here.
You shall above all things be glad and young. (Meaning)
Notice the convulsed orange inch of moon perching on this silver minute of evening
His lips drink water but his heart drinks wine (Meaning)
Treat a man like dirt-he produces flowers.
Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.
An artist, a man, a failure, must proceed.
Suppose Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head. (Meaning)
Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.
Time's a strange fellow; more he gives than takes (and he takes all).
Love is thicker than forget more thinner than recall more seldom than a wave is wet more frequent than to fail it is most mad and moonly and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only is deeper than the sea love is less always than to win less never than alive less bigger than the least begin less littler than forgive it is most sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky which only is higher than the sky
Equality is what does not exist among mortals.
Nothing can surpass the mystery of stillness (Meaning)
Tomorrow is our permanent address and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do, we’ll move away still further:into now
I spill my bright incalculable soul
What time is it? It is by every star a different time, and each most falsely true.
Losing through you what seemed myself, i find selves unimaginably mine; beyond sorrow's own joys and hopings very fears yours is the light by which my spirit's born: yours is the darkness of my soul's return... you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
Really unreal world, will you perhaps do the breathing for me while I am away?
When skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man
That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.
May my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living whatever they sing is better than to know and if men should not hear them men are old may my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple and even if it's Sunday may I be wrong for whenever men are right they are not young and may myself do nothing usefully and love yourself so more than truly there's never been quite such a fool who could fail pulling all the sky over him with one smile
We're anything brighter than even the sun. (Meaning)
Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself - whoever himself may be - is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.
If you like my poems let them walk in the evening, a little behind you.
Love is a deeper season than reason; my sweet one.
― E. E. Cummings Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
