27 Quotes by Sam Hamill

It's best to be like water,nurturing the ten thousand thingswithout competing,flowing into places people scorn,very like the Tao.Make the earth a dwelling place.Cultivate the heart and mind.Practice benevolence.Stand by your word.Govern with equity.Serve skillfully.Act in a timely way,without contentiousness,free of blame.

Heaven is eternal. The earth endures.The reason for heaven's eternity and earth's enduranceis that they do not live for themselves only, and thereby live forever.The sage steps back but remains in front,the outside always within.Self is realized through selflessness.

Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.

Most of the ugly wars in history have been wars of religion. And there’s nothing more dangerous than someone with religious certitude who creates consequences in the world that to me are simply inexcusable.

Of course, there are some people who behave rudely. Allen Ginsberg used to like to get up in public and take his clothes off. I don’t do that, but I liked Allen Ginsberg. He was a nice guy.

George W. Bush is using language that’s a mirror image of the language of Osama bin Laden when he says, “We have God on our side. This is the struggle of good against evil.”

How reluctantly the bee emerges from deep within the peony.

Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, “Oh, I really like your Zen poems.” And I say, “Which ones are not Zen poems?”

What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that’s what makes poetry so dangerous. That’s why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There’s nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.