Five or Eight Quotes and a Poem from E.E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings
October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Life's not a paragraph and death I think is no parenthesis”

“I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”

“I imagine that yes is the only living thing."

Humanity I love You

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you

More in the Five Quotes series
Urban Simplicity