Poetry Quotes
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.Bertrand Russell
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.Ralph Waldo Emerson
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.T. S. Eliot
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.M. C. Richards
It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.Boris Pasternak
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic
Marty This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.This Is Spinal Tap
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.Robert Graves
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.Frederick William Robertson
Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.John Keats
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause and say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.Martin Luther King Jr.
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.Stephen Leacock, 1912
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.Martin Luther King, Jr.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.Jean Giraudoux
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.Oscar Wilde
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.Henry David Thoreau
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.Bertrand Russell
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.Socrates
What is important - what lasts - In another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.Peter Brodie
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.Henry David Thoreau
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.Martin Luther King, Jr.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.Robert Frost
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.R. Z. Sheppard, book critic
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.Robert Frost
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.Oscar Wilde
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream - A scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows - Is essentially poetry.Jesse Louis Jackson
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.Simonides
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.John Ruskin
Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.Johnson
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose words in their best order - Poetry the best words in the best order.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.Jean Cocteau
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
