Edward Estlin (E. E.) Cummings often styled as e e cummings, as he is attributed in many of his published works, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression. These E E Cummings quotes will motivate you.
Best E E Cummings Quotes
- “The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “To be nobody-but-yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “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.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: – you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.” ~ e. e. cummings
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“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “The first step to expanding your reality is to discard the tendency to exclude things from possibility.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “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.” ~ e. e. cummings
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“You and I are more than you and I because it’s we.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “May my heart always be open to little birds, who are the secrets of living. Whatever they sing is better than to know. And if men should not hear them – then men are old.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “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.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “(existing’s tricky:but to live’s a gift)” ~ e. e. cummings
- “…remember one thing only: that it’s you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I’d rather have two good friends, than 500,000 admirers.” ~ e. e. cummings
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“Exists no miracle mightier than this: to feel.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses” ~ e. e. cummings
- “a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being” ~ e. e. cummings
- “The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “And now you are and I am and we’re a mystery which will never happen again.” ~ e. e. cummings
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“Most people are perfectly afraid of silence” ~ e. e. cummings
- “The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Someone asked me what home was and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your ribcage.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. Anaïs Nin I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved. George Eliot Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” ~ e. e. cummings
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“The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear. . .” ~ e. e. cummings
- “You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Laughing is just another way of showing people your wise” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “A pretty girl who is naked / is worth a million statues” ~ e. e. cummings
- “there’s time for laughing and there’s time for crying— for hoping for despair for peace for longing —a time for growing and a time for dying: a night for silence and a day for singing but more than all(as all your more than eyes tell me)there is a time for timelessness” ~ e. e. cummings
- “And this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart I carry your heart [ i carry it in my heart ]” ~ e. e. cummings
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“Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. I like your body. I like what it does, I like its hows. I like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which I will again and again and again kiss, I like kissing this and that of you, I like, slowly stroking the shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs, and possibly I like the thrill of under me you so quite new.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It’s always our self we find in the sea.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “The hardest fight a man has to fight is to live in a world where every single day someone is trying to make you someone you do not want to be–” ~ e. e. cummings
- “here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart I carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)” ~ e. e. cummings
- “may I be I is the only prayer–not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong.” ~ e. e. cummings
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“One’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “An intelligent person fights for lost causes, realizing that others are merely effects” ~ e. e. cummings
- “A bouquet of clumsy words: you know that place between sleep and awake where you’re still dreaming but it’s slowly slipping? I wish we could feel like that more often. I also wish I could click my fingers three times and be transported to anywhere I like. I wish that people didn’t always say ‘just wondering’ when you both know there was a real reason behind them asking. And I wish I could get lost in the stars. Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Love is the whole and more than all.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries and that nothing measurable matters ‘a very good God damn’; that ‘an artist, a man, a failure’ is no mere when fully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity-neither some soulless and heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being-a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “twice I have lived forever in a smile” ~ e. e. cummings
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“Only by you my heart always moves.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I love you much most beautiful darling more than anyone on the earth and I like you better than everything in the sky.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Because you aren’t afraid to kiss the dirt (and consequently dare to climb the sky)” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “To destroy is always the first step in any creation.” ~ E E Cummings quotes
- “Be of love a little more careful than of anything.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “As small as a world as large as alone.” ~ e. e. cummings
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“The eyes of my eyes are opened.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Do not hate or fear the artist in yourselves… Honor and love him…do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. Only the artist in yourself is more truthful than the night.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “you said Is there anything which is dead or alive more beautiful than my body, to have in your fingers (trembling ever so little)? Looking into your eyes Nothing, I said, except the air of spring smelling of never and forever. ….and through the lattice which moved as if a hand is touched by a hand(which moved as though fingers touch a girl’s breast, lightly) Do you believe in always, the wind said to the rain I am too busy with my flowers to believe, the rain answered” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Suppose Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I fear no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet) I want no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows” ~ e. e. cummings
- “I fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows” ~ e. e. cummings
