TOP 30 poetry QUOTES (of 1000)

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What's Bagism? It's like... a tag for what we all do, we're all in a bag ya know, and we realised that we came from two bags, I was in this pop bag going round and round in my little clique, and she was in her little avant-garde clique going round and round, and you're in your little tele clique and they're in their...ya know? and we all sort of come out and look at each other every now and then, but we don't communicate. And we all intellectualise about how there is no barrier between art, music, poetry... but we're still all "I'm a rock and roller, he's a poet" ... so we just came up with the word so you would ask us what bagism is, and we'd say "WE'RE ALL IN A BAG BABY!"

— John Lennon poetry

Every age has its own ; in every age the circumstances ofchoose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

— Jean Paul Sartre poetry

Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as 's poetry and God's mercy to man.

— Ambrose Bierce poetry

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

— George Bernard Shaw poetry

is finer and morethan ; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

— Aristotle poetry

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson poetry

I used to worship the mighty genius of— that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture — great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast — for luncheon — for dinner — for tea — for supper — for between meals. I like a change, occasionally.

— Mark Twain poetry

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

— Henry David Thoreau poetry

The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth". It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

— H. L. Mencken poetry

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry.

— Samuel Johnson poetry

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

— Niels Bohr poetry

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another; they might also ask themselves how much poetry of any period they can honestly say that they understand.

— W. H. Auden poetry

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.

— Gustave Flaubert poetry

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

— Friedrich Nietzsche poetry

The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

— Richard Dawkins poetry

If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

— Walt Whitman poetry

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

— G. K. Chesterton poetry

[Most people] are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. … Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.

— George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) poetry

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

— T. S. Eliot poetry

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley poetry

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...

— Erica Jong poetry

He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.

— Walker Percy poetry

Why do you paint? For exactly the same reason I breathe. That’s not an answer. There isn’t any answer. How long hasn’t there been any answer? As long as I can remember. And how long have you written? As long as I can remember. I mean poetry. So do I.

— E. E. Cummings poetry

The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poetry

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

— William Wordsworth poetry

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

— John Milton poetry

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry.

— John Donne poetry

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!

— William Blake poetry

Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.

— Nicolas Chamfort poetry

Who wants to understand the poem Must go to the land of poetry; Who wishes to understand the poet Must go to the poet's land.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe poetry

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb

— Charles Baudelaire poetry

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library … Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

— Jorge Luis Borges poetry

I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in .

— Larry Wall poetry

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.

— John Keats poetry

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act...The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. Houseman's test for great poetry.

— A. E. Housman poetry

Poetical beauty. ...We know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists of proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists of healing. But we do not know in whatconsists, which is the object of poetry.

— Blaise Pascal poetry

To be sterile - with so many sensations! Perpetual poetry without words.

— Emil Cioran poetry

I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry

— William Faulkner poetry

Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice

— Izaak Walton poetry

The greatest poets never write poetry. Theandare not the greatest — they are only the greatest that we can know. And so withamong musicians. For the highest poetry, whether in music or literature, is ineffable — it must be felt from one person to another, it cannot be articulated.

— Samuel Butler (novelist) poetry

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

— Herbert Spencer poetry

My meaning (dear Mother) is in these sonnets, to declare my resolution to be, that my poor abilities in poetry, shall be all and ever consecrated to God's glory.

— George Herbert poetry

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

— Edgar Allan Poe poetry

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

— Bob Dylan poetry

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

— Robert M. Pirsig poetry

One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was 's Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of a glorious passage:

— Nikola Tesla poetry

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

— AnaЇs Nin poetry

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

— William Butler Yeats poetry

[Footnote] At the age of twelve Nero had shown a lively interest in the arts, particularly music, painting, sculpture, and poetry. Why was nothing done about this?

— Will Cuppy poetry

Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.

— Internet poetry

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

— Virginia Woolf poetry

He offers a handshake, crooked five fingers They form a pattern yet to be matched On the surface simplicity But the darkest pit in me is pagan poetry

— Bj¶rk poetry

Piety in art—poetry in art— in art—let us be careful how we confound them.

— Artist poetry

If music and sweet poetry agree.

— Composer poetry

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

— Theodor Adorno poetry

Cut out the poetry, Watson.

— Sherlock Holmes poetry

Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.

— J. D. Salinger poetry

Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings.

— Denise Levertov poetry

NOTE: It is unlikely that the following poem, translated by Mary Jacob, is authored by Han-shan. In comparing it with every poem in the corpus it will be found that there is not a close match. Moreover, neither the language nor the content of this poem is that of Han-shan. Most importantly, this poem does not have the appropriate number of lines for a Han-shan poem. Jacob’s poem has 9 lines; there is not a single example of a 9 line poem in all of Han-shan’s poetry. All of Han-shan’s poems are 4, 8, 10 or 14 lines, with a few that have more than 14. Further, Jacob’s poem has an odd number of lines; there is not a single example of a poem with an odd number of lines in all of Han-shan’s poetry. Finally, the 9th and final line in Jacob’s poem has the words “ha ha ha.” Not a single Han-shan poem has those words as a final line. Perhaps someone is having a joke?

— Hanshan poetry

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

— Willa Cather poetry

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

— Rumi poetry

A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."

— Richard Brautigan poetry

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

— William Hazlitt poetry

Life is a b movie. It's stupid and it's strange, A directionless story, And the dialogue is lame. But in the he said, she said, Sometimes there's some poetry, If you turn your back long enough, And let it happen naturally.

— Ani Difranco poetry

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

— Lascelles Abercrombie poetry

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

— Peter Abrahams poetry

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

— Robert Adamson poetry

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

— Sherman Alexie poetry

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

— Yehuda Amichai poetry

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

— A. R. Ammons poetry

That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.

— David Amram poetry

For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad.

— Lemon Andersen poetry

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

— David Antin poetry

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

— Simon Armitage poetry

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

— Antonin Artaud poetry

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

— John Ashbery poetry

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

— Brooks Atkinson poetry

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

— Rene Auberjonois poetry

Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.

— Raymond Aubrac poetry

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

— Paul Auster poetry

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

— Gaston Bachelard poetry

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

— Julianna Baggott poetry

The Scottish Highlands are incredible. There seems to be magic and poetry everywhere.

— Caitriona Balfe poetry

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

— Lynda Barry poetry

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

— John Barton poetry

Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!

— Roberto Benigni poetry

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

— Andrew Bird poetry

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

— Lisa Bonet poetry

If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.

— Tara Brach poetry

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

— Georges Braque poetry

The cliche is dead poetry.

— Gerald Brenan poetry

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.

— Theresa Breslin poetry

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

— Robert Bringhurst poetry

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

— James Broughton poetry

I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

— J. Carter Brown poetry

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

— Norman O. Brown poetry

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

— Anatole Broyard poetry

The 10 best poetry quotes

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