Sara Teasdale Quotes

You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.

They can put me in a jungle. Still, I can create.

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

If I'm going to be a caged bird, I'll sing the best song I can.

Yet there is a dignity in the human spirit which can become most clearly visible in the moment of defeat and disaster.

Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.

You cannot break the human spirit.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

It’s the spirit here that counts. The time may be long, the vehicle may be strange or unexpected. But if the dream is held close to the heart, and imagination is applied to what there is close at hand, everything is still possible.

Satan, the Hinderer, may build a barrier about us, but he can never roof us in, so that we cannot look up.

I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

That's how it goes, my friend. The problem is not falling a captive, it's how to avoid surrender.

With my singing I can make, a refuge for my spirit's sake; a house of shining words, to be my fragile immortality.

I was shown a fledgling learning to fly. It's first efforts were very feeble. But as it used its wings more and more, they became stronger until it found the freedom of flight and was able to soar to great heights and fly great distance without any effort. I heard the words: Faith comes with practice. Live by faith until it becomes rocklike unshakable, and find the true freedom of the spirit.

I am a dreamer but when I wake, you can't break my spirit, it's my dreams you take

If the future's looking dark, We're the ones who have to shine. If there's no one in control, We're the ones who draw the line. Though we live in trying times, We're the ones who have to try. And we know that time has wings, So we're the ones who have to fly.

If I cannot fly, let me sing.

...for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.

There are so many times in one's life, when one feels he has nothing more to offer. But no, my river has not run dry.

It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.

With a goose-quill and a few sheets of paper, I mock myself of the universe. They say I am the son of a courtesan; it may be so, but I have the heart of a King. I live free, I enjoy myself, I can call myself happy.

I'd faced a lot of rejection from labels and the industry, and it was getting hard to keep believing in myself. But something wouldn't let me - inside - I had this voice that was relentlessly hopeful, and honestly, I just loved performing and writing too much to ever really quit.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat.