Top 100 A Poet Quotes
#1. I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
Yehuda Amichai
#2. I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet ...
Leni Riefenstahl
#3. The mind of a poet often performs miracles-a few coarse-grained words, apprehended become bullets and roses.
Amado V. Hernandez
#4. I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
Bob Dylan
#5. It will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.
Samuel Johnson
#6. And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.
Richard Selzer
#7. Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
Janet Fitch
#9. It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.
Marianne Moore
#10. I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
August Wilson
#11. If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft ... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
Anthony Burgess
#12. You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
John Adams
#13. A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#14. None but a poet can understand a poet; none but a romantic spirit transported with poetry and consecrated in the Holy of Holies an comprehend what the ordained utters out of his inspiration.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
#15. Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.
Billy Bragg
#16. For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.
Robin Morgan
#17. How can you take such a risk? This could mean anything! It could mean nothing at all! Haven't you heard of fiction? This might be just from the imagination of a poet!
Jason Ellis
#18. A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#19. I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
Alex Grey
#20. I am a revolutionary, so my son can be a farmer, so his son can be a poet.
John Adams
#21. I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.
Ian Fleming
#22. James McMurtry is a true Americana poet - actually he is a poet regardless of genre
Michael Nesmith
#23. Jule was a poet - poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.
Joan D. Vinge
#24. I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
Leonard Cohen
#25. The sun set beyond thesea, so says the poet - and when a poet mentions a sea, we have to accept it; no harm in letting a poet describe his vision, no need to question his geography.
R.K. Narayan
#26. Only a poet can translate for the dead.
Marty Rubin
#27. I told her the clitoris is like a Bonsai tree that needs constant tending and the g-spot is an unexplored island waiting to have a flag pinned on its peak. She laughed and said I should be a poet. Then we went to bed and crossed the sheets as if it were a new continent we had just discovered.
Chloe Thurlow
#28. I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional ... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
Dana Goodyear
#29. None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Edith Hamilton
#30. They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love
Saul Williams
#31. A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.
Mary Oliver
#33. At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
#34. Sweetheart, when you break thru you'll find a poet here, not quite what one would choose.
Diane Di Prima
#35. Frivolous Gossip and Poetry
It's just so much frivolous gossip to dwell upon the moral merits of a poet;
what should only concern the reader is the merit of his words.
Leave moral judgments to the preachers and aesthetic judgments to the critical readers.
Beryl Dov
#36. A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#37. Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
Sigmund Freud
#38. Luckily, the world is absolutely full of interesting things to do. Only lack of imagination, or lack of energy, stand in the way. Otherwise each of us could be a poet or musician, an inventor or explorer, an amateur scholar, scientist, artist, or collector.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#40. Nobody has to tell nobody nothing," I say, taking another step forward.
"You never were a poet, were you, Todd?" he says.
Patrick Ness
#41. A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweller, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more.
Horace Walpole
#43. They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
Janet Frame
#44. If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don't think I'm a very good poet!
Jack Gleeson
#45. How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.
Virginia Woolf
#46. He who without the Muse's madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.
Plato
#47. I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.
Vladimir Nabokov
#48. When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right.
Robert Frost
#49. A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.
Sherman Alexie
#50. I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#51. Tell me, cat-man, why can I understand her?"
"First," said Eanrin with a glower, "you will not call me 'cat-man' again. I am a knight, a poet, and a gentleman, and you will address me as sir or not address me at all.
Anne Elisabeth Stengl
#52. I'm not a poet and I'm not a nature lover and I'm not an Anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.
Nescio
#53. And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
Virginia Woolf
#54. A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words.
Debasish Mridha
#55. I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.
Eileen Myles
#56. I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.
James Arthur
#57. One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
Nathalie Sarraute
#58. All babies are incoherent, but they grow up. That is the principle difference between an infant and a poet.
Sharyn McCrumb
#59. A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.
Orson Welles
#60. A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#61. I thought I was going to be a poet when I was in college, but then I found out I was poor so I decided to do something I'd get paid for.
Josh Lieb
#63. The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That's the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.
Anna Kamienska
#64. I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.
Mary Oliver
#65. We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
George Steiner
#66. I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
Alice Oswald
#67. My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
Natasha Trethewey
#68. If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.
Nikki Giovanni
#69. Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
#70. He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#71. Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.
Bruce Chatwin
#72. To be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
Susan Sontag
#73. At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
Walter Kirn
#74. The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.
Peter Davison
#75. You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.
William Carlos Williams
#76. It is the function of a poet to relate not things that have happened, but things that may happen,
Aristotle.
#77. To become a poet, the most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.
Nikki Giovanni
#78. A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H.L. Mencken
#79. I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.
Dorianne Laux
#80. The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.
David Sedaris
#81. To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.
Eileen Myles
#82. The eyes of a poet discover in each person a unique and irreplaceable humanity. While arrogant intellect seeks to control and manipulate the world, the poetic spirit bows with reverence before its mysteries.
Daisaku Ikeda
#83. A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
#84. Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.
Andre Malraux
#85. To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.
Robert E. Sherwood
#86. Everybody wants to identify things about a poet or about a playwright. They want to codify something or put it in terms that can be understood. We want to understand something, because that's how our minds work. We like to understand things, and it's discomfiting if we don't understand things.
Anthony Zerbe
#87. For a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.
Plato
#88. Frida. So after all, it is not for nothing that I was born a poet. For now she is going forth into the great wide world, that I once yearned so passionately to see. Little Frida sets out in a splendid covered sledge with silver bells on the harness -
Henrik Ibsen
#89. There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#90. My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.
Marilynne Robinson
#91. I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.
Mary Ruefle
#92. Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.
Adam Kirsch
#93. Many luckless people imagine that romance is dead: some, overcivilised, fondly suppose that there never was romance: a poet tells us that romance is unrecognised though really present: but scientists can meet him daily, walking at large and undisguised in the world.
Archibald Hill
#94. Nietzsche: A poet with a philosophy. A system without a method. A mustache with a man.
Eric Jarosinski
#95. A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.
Jane Kenyon
#96. A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
Eyvind Johnson
#97. Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.
Anne Stevenson
#98. He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician.
Tom Hayden
#100. It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
Clive James
