Top 200 May Sarton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation.”

— May Sarton

2. “We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening and strange that self may prove to be.”

— May Sarton

3. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”

— May Sarton

4. “Absence becomes the greatest Presence.”

— May Sarton

5. “Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.”

— May Sarton

6. “No partner in a love relationship should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.”

— May Sarton

7. “The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable.”

— May Sarton

8. “Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.”

— May Sarton

9. “Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.”

— May Sarton

10. “In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing – the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”

— May Sarton

11. “It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.”

— May Sarton

12. “What is there to do when people die – people so dear and rare – but bring them back by remembering?”

— May Sarton

13. “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”

— May Sarton

14. “So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.”

— May Sarton

15. “I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.”

— May Sarton

16. “I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.”

— May Sarton

17. “It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.”

— May Sarton

18. “Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.”

— May Sarton

19. “People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.”

— May Sarton

20. “Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

— May Sarton

21. “The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.”

— May Sarton

22. “Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.”

— May Sarton

23. “I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.”

— May Sarton

24. “Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.”

— May Sarton

25. “Time unbounded is hard to handle.”

— May Sarton

26. “Fighting dragons is my holy joy.”

— May Sarton

27. “It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.”

— May Sarton

28. “A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.”

— May Sarton

29. “One thing is certain, and I have always known it – the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about.”

— May Sarton

30. “Plants do not speak, but their silence is alive with change.”

— May Sarton

31. “Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.”

— May Sarton

32. “The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It’s a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.”

— May Sarton

33. “It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.”

— May Sarton

34. “What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.”

— May Sarton

35. “In the garden the door is always open into the “holy” – growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.”

— May Sarton

36. “We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.”

— May Sarton

37. “Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.”

— May Sarton

38. “The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.”

— May Sarton

39. “For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.”

— May Sarton

40. “It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can’t, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.”

— May Sarton

41. “I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.”

— May Sarton

42. “It’s extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other – there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.”

— May Sarton

43. “I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It’s not weird if you feel deeply.”

— May Sarton

44. “Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.”

— May Sarton

45. “Not happiness, perhaps, but something like New England itself – struggle, occasional triumph over adversity, above all the power to endure and to be renewed. For here the roses grow beside the granite.”

— May Sarton

46. “I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.”

— May Sarton

47. “Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.”

— May Sarton

48. “I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.”

— May Sarton

49. “And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can’t. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can’t.”

— May Sarton

50. “Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

— May Sarton