Top 200 May Sarton Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.”

— May Sarton

102. “We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.”

— May Sarton

103. “I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and “the house and I resume old conversations”.”

— May Sarton

104. “Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal – and these balances are shifting all the time.”

— May Sarton

105. “The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.”

— May Sarton

106. “Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything – except itself.”

— May Sarton

107. “Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.”

— May Sarton

108. “When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn’t heard.”

— May Sarton

109. “Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.”

— May Sarton

110. “All aspiring writers say these things: “I will not compromise and write a best seller!“ – as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can.”

— May Sarton

111. “For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.”

— May Sarton

112. “I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not.”

— May Sarton

113. “We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth.”

— May Sarton

114. “It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?”

— May Sarton

115. “Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.”

— May Sarton

116. “True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.”

— May Sarton

117. “I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.”

— May Sarton

118. “It feels a long way up and down from zero.”

— May Sarton

119. “Nobody stays special when they’re old, Anna. That’s what we have to learn.”

— May Sarton

120. “Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person.”

— May Sarton

121. “The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?”

— May Sarton

122. “It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!”

— May Sarton

123. “People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!”

— May Sarton

124. “In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.”

— May Sarton

125. “Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?”

— May Sarton

126. “Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?”

— May Sarton

127. “For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you’re feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you’re reading.”

— May Sarton

128. “They are commiting murder who merely live.”

— May Sarton

129. “I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.”

— May Sarton

130. “You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love.”

— May Sarton

131. “Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?”

— May Sarton

132. “I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.”

— May Sarton

133. “It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.”

— May Sarton

134. “The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.”

— May Sarton

135. “Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.”

— May Sarton

136. “It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person...”

— May Sarton

137. “At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.”

— May Sarton

138. “The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.”

— May Sarton

139. “Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed.”

— May Sarton

140. “Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another human being is detachment. Attachment, even that which imagines it is selfless, always lays some burden on the other person.”

— May Sarton

141. “Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets – they’re more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.”

— May Sarton

142. “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

143. “Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer.”

— May Sarton

144. “I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, ‘won’t go,’ or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person’s face.”

— May Sarton

145. “I suppose one has to remember that ‘life’ is important too, though it’s something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.”

— May Sarton

146. “About loving, I have little to learn from the young.”

— May Sarton

147. “I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I’m not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.”

— May Sarton

148. “When it comes to the important things one is always alone...”

— May Sarton

149. “Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.”

— May Sarton

150. “Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.”

— May Sarton