Poetry Quotes
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.Frederick William Robertson
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
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
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.Robert Frost
It is written on the arched sky It looks out from every star It is the poetry of Nature It is that which uplifts the spirit within us.John Ruskin
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
Wine is bottled poetry.Robert Louis Stevenson
Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.Lord Byron
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.Jean Cocteau
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.Emily Dickinson
We have more poets thatnjudges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem that to understand a good one.Michel de Montaigne
Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.Russell Bake
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.Oscar Wilde
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest to reach true perfection.E. C. Stedman
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.
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.
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
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
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)
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.Oscar Wilde
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
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.Christopher Fry
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
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.Jean Giraudoux
Poetry the best words in the best order.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.Charles Baudelaire
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.Donald E. Knuth
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
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.William Wordsworth
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
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
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.Lewis Thomas
