Piet Hein Quotes

CANDLE WISDOM

If you knew
what you will know
when your candle
has burnt low,
it would greatly
ease your plight
while your candle
still burns bright.

Knowing what
Thou knowest not
Is in a sense
Omniscience.

Nobody can be lucky all the time,
so when your luck deserts you in some fashion
don't think you've been abandoned in your prime,
but rather that you're saving up your ration.

What Love Is Like

Love is like
a pineapple,
sweet and
undefinable.

Naive you are
if you believe
life favours those
who aren't naive.

TIMING TOAST
Grook on how to char for yourself

There's an art of knowing when.
Never try to guess.
Toast until it smokes and then
twenty seconds less.

Those who always
know what’s best
are
a universal pest.

We ought to live each day as though
it were our last day here below.
But if I did, alas, I know
it would have killed me long ago.

THE CURE FOR EXHAUSTION

Sometimes, exhausted
with toil and endeavour,
I wish I could sleep
for ever and ever;
but then this reflection
my longing allays:
I shall be doing it
one of these days.

MAKING AN EFFORT
Our so-called limitations, I believe,
apply to faculties we don't apply.
We don't discover what we can't achieve
until we make an effort not to try.

THE WISDOM OF THE SPHERES

How instructive
is a star!
It can teach us
from afar
just how small
each other are.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP

Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping.

It isn't enough to exasperate others. You have to remember to gladden yourself!

Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,
trying to say-
for the thousandth time-
what's easier done than said.

ASTRO-GYMNASTICS

Go on a starlit night,
stand on your head,
leave your feet dangling
outwards into space,
and let the starry
firmament you tread
be, for the moment,
your elected base.

Feel Earth's colossal weight
of ice and granite,
of molten magma,
water, iron, and lead;
and briefly hold
this strangely solid planet
balanced upon
your strangely solid head.