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

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