Evil Poetry Quotes

#1. Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

Dmitri Shostakovich

#2. But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?

Carol Ann Duffy

#3. Life goes on in the same manner,
evil wins and peace is slaughtered.
Change the channel, change the view,
tired of the same reruns on the evening news.

Susie Clevenger

#4. You must be a poet,
a lady of evil luck
desiring to be what you are not,
longing to be
what you can only visit.

Anne Sexton

#5. My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

Charles Baudelaire

#6. Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

Charles Lamb

#7. They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.

Terry Pratchett

#8. The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil's whole structure away.

C.S. Lewis

#9. Poetry to [Milosz], then, was not so much a weapon as a witness against evil.

Leonard Nathan

#10. Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purposes, whether of good or of evil.

Horace Mann

#11. To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty as those who abuse. Stand up for the innocent or go down with the rest.

Flora Jessop

#12. ...citizens of the U.S. live under an Empire of "evil doers" who have set themselves juxtaposed to humanity instilling in us from our youngest days how to slay our human element in exchange for an external existence of malnourished pride.

Steven Storm

#13. Nothingness
... there in this place
where nothingness takes
but for the glimmer
a steadfast shimmer
all would be consumed ...

Muse

#14. Depths of Friendship
... under fathoms deep
of dark and bitter cold
an eerie oscillation
reverberated brash and bold ...

Muse

#15. Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)

Callimachus

#16. It's a poem, for crying out loud! The beauty of poetry is that it can mean different things to different people at different times. But you know they're expecting one specific, so-called correct answer, and any other thoughtful response will be counted off. It's wrong to dissect poetry like this!

Wendy Higgins

#17. We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

John Steinbeck

#18. O benefit of ill! Now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuk'd to my content,
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

William Shakespeare

#19. One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

William Wordsworth

#20. Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#21. Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.

Geoffrey Hill

#22. When I try to achieve greatness, it spits on me the night before.

Monroe Ariel