Poetry Quotes

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

Poetry the best words in the best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Lord Byron

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)

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo

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 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

Wine is bottled poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Beverly Nichols

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

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Courtly love - Poetry may first have been written during long periods of abstinence on the Crusades, but it would not have flourished in the cold of northern Europe without some help from the chimney.

James Burke

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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

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

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

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

Virginia

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

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

Oscar Wilde

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Kahlil Gibran

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

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

John Masefield

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

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

M. C. Richards

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

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

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

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

There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.

Robert Graves