William saroyan love poems

Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.

William Saroyan

Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.

William Saroyan

The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit.

William Saroyan

Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

William Saroyan

Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.

William Saroyan

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.

William Saroyan

Everybody has got to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?

William Saroyan

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

William Saroyan

He paints for the blind, and we are the blind, and he lets us see for sure what we saw long ago but weren't sure we saw. He paints for the dead, to remind us that -- great good God, think of it -- we're alive ...

William Saroyan

He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship.

William Saroyan

Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met.

William Saroyan

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?

William Saroyan

I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.

William Saroyan

I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.

William Saroyan

I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.

William Saroyan

I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless.

William Saroyan

If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it.

William Saroyan

If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.

William Saroyan

In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.

William Saroyan

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.

William Saroyan

No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend, and there are many more of these than one would suspect.

William Saroyan

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

William Saroyan

Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let be free and unashamed.

William Saroyan

The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself.

William Saroyan

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

William Saroyan