Poetry Quotes
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
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
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.Jean Cocteau
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.Plato
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
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
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.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.Mario Cuomo
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
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.Simonides
Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large - How large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce - How scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.Alfred North Whitehead
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 is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic
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
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.Kahlil Gibran
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
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
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.Havelock Ellis
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.John Adams
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
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
Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.Lord Byron
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.Thomas Carlyle
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
Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.Beverly Nichols
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
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest to reach true perfection.E. C. Stedman
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.Percy Bysshe Shelley
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
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.Christopher Fry
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.Frederick William Robertson
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.Robert Graves
The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.L. Schefe
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
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.Oscar Wilde
