Top 100 In Verse Quotes
#1. ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.
Ambrose Bierce
#2. I wanted to do justice to texts that are in verse in their original, so I tried to invest my version with a comparable poetic power; hence even more literary fireworks there.
Hal Duncan
#4. A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.
Lee Strasberg
#5. The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse ... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.
Robert Frost
#6. If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
#7. For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other should rather be called a Physiologist than a Poet.
Aristotle.
#8. A translation in verse ... seems to me something absurd, impossible.
Victor Hugo
#9. Much which is unworthy in human life might be avoided if people would only accustom themselves to talking in verse
Karen Blixen
#10. Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.
Dave Beard
#11. a~call it a blessing or call it a curse, but I see all of life in verse~
Lynn Orloff
#12. Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin.
Virginia Euwer Wolff
#13. Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
Jonathan Swift
#14. Luxury has been railed at for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and it has always been loved.
Voltaire
#15. In Phebus realm, in knowledge as in verse,All things are clear, the sun of Phoebus clear,Clear was his crystal, the Kastalian.What you cannot clearly say, you don't know:To tongue of man his thought brings word:What's said obscurely is what's thought obscurely.
Esaias Tegner
#16. The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
Natalie Babbitt
#17. The charms of money are distinctly under-represented in literature. There are no songs or poems extolling its virtues. This seems on the face of it strange. The claims of money to be celebrated in verse might well seem to be no less than those of faithful dogs, beautiful women, or jugs of wine.
Celia Green
#18. Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.
Ellen Hopkins
#19. I would like to champion diverse forms like graphic novels and works told in verse and diverse writers and illustrators and diverse authors as well.
Malorie Blackman
#20. He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#21. over the centuries Dante has been variously "constructed" - as lover, statesman, neo-Platonist, proto-Protestant, Romantic visionary, Byronic hero, Pre-Raphaelite, father of his country, theologian in verse, precursor of the modern novel, and, finally, altissimo poeta, the consummate poet.
Peter S. Hawkins
#22. People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse and prose, and people have always delighted in it.
Voltaire
#23. Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse ... I never pin up my hair with prose."
William Congreve
#24. The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
Dr. Seuss
#25. Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.
John Donne
#26. The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.
Dr. Seuss
#27. As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
N. Scott Momaday
#28. I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.
David Ives
#29. The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Robert Morgan
#30. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.
Daniel Kahneman
#31. There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.
Ellen Hopkins
#33. You now have learned enough to see That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse - But all may be described in verse.
Garrison Keillor
#34. It may happen that he sends a letter in verse, a mag-ni-fi-cent one, but which afterward he might wish to bring back with the tears of his whole life, for the sense of beauty is violated.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#35. Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.
Paul Valery
#36. In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.
Martin Amis
#37. You cannot find one single verse in the New Testament that calls for violence against non-believers. Jesus said to love your enemies. Muhammad said to butcher your enemies.
Robert Jeffress
#39. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire
#40. An important verse to memorize is: "God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
Billy Graham
#41. Hunting Verse - Feet that make no noise; eyes that can see in the dark; ears that can hear the winds in their lairs, and sharp white teeth, all
Rudyard Kipling
#42. The Lord Buddha was once asked by a disciple to sum up the whole of His teaching in one verse. He replied: Cease to do evil; Learn to do well; Cleanse your own heart; This is the religion of the Buddha.
Arthur E. Powell
#43. I could not eat a kangaroo. But many fine Australians do. Those with cookbooks as well as boomerangs Prefer him in tasty kangaroo-meringues.
Ogden Nash
#44. Matt smirked. Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry?
Jessica Park
#45. The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#46. I always look for a "rhythm" in my writing. A cadence to the sentences. Sometimes I think of pieces I write in a song writing infrastructure - i.e., a verse, a chorus that I return to, a bridge that's something differenct, a chorus that I return to.
Mitch Albom
#47. This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1-what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.
Michio Kaku
#48. I am my own reflection
But when I look at me
I can see your affliction
Munia Khan
#49. Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?
Vladimir Nabokov
#50. In the Ummah, there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E., when the so-called "verse of hijab" suddenly descended upon the community. That verse, however, was addressed not to women in general, but exclusively to Muhammad's wives:
Reza Aslan
#51. Verizon had just come out with FiOS, and AT&T had U-verse. We came up with a couple of options, and then our marketing people came in and said, 'What do you think of Xfinity?'
Brian L. Roberts
#52. Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me -
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
Sappho
#53. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
G.K. Chesterton
#54. Take down the walls.
Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.
Otherwise you may never know hell, but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying.
Lauren Oliver
#55. in the Quran, chapter 2, verse 256 that states: "There is no compulsion in religion -- the right way is indeed clearly distinct from error. So whoever disbelieves in the devil and believes in God, he indeed lays hold on the firmest handle which shall never break. And God is Hearing, Knowing.
Angela Walden
#56. Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.
Charles Baudelaire
#57. I had heard that verse many times but in a flash of insight realized that one of the keys I had missed was that hadn't trained my mind to believe, to think positively, to have faith in either God or myself.
Norman Vincent Peale
#58. Marriages performed within,' read the sign next to the coffeehouse door, underneath in small letters a verse that combined warning with a sales pitch: 'When lawless lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin.
Toni Morrison
#59. It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public.
Fran Lebowitz
#60. Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.
Dylan Thomas
#61. Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...
as orchids
blooming in clouds.
Sanober Khan
#62. I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
Howard Nemerov
#63. The dusty library air is electric with secrets/ almost palpable in the thick quiet that bounces between/ Cal and those books and me
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#64. A verse came to mind, one that has comforted Kari before. It was the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept. If he cried over Jerusalem, if he cried over the death of Lazarus, surely he was crying now over the death of her dreams, the death of her marriage.
Karen Kingsbury
#65. Thus it is, we sow motions of hatred out of our own impoverished understanding of love. Yet we do so in the name of love. The perplexing precipice of the illusory infirmity.
Steven Storm
#66. As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
Ezra Pound
#67. For what else is tragedy than the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have attached high value to external things? [27]
Epictetus
#68. Yet truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires, And decorate the verse herself inspires: This fact, in virtue's name, let Crabbe attest,- Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best.
Lord Byron
#69. I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, 'Oh, that's the hook right there,' I'll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.
Drake
#70. For me, before I go on stage, it all depends. Might be a girl, might be an edible, might be a verse, might be somebody mixing something in my drink without me knowing - hopefully that won't happen tonight.
Wyclef Jean
#71. But touch me, and no minister so sore.
Whoe'er offends, at some unlucky time
Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme,
Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
And the sad burthen of some merry song.
Alexander Pope
#72. I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#73. The shortest verse in the Bible is 'Jesus wept.' The only thing wrong with it is the past tense.
R. K. Milholland
#74. Who all in raptures their own works rehearse, And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse.
Charles Churchill
#75. Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.
Louis MacNeice
#76. Yet do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young
William Shakespeare
#77. My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
John Darnielle
#78. Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
George Herbert
#79. The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin', in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.
John Thorn
#80. Where in the Bible are we told in one verse not to do a thing and in the next to do it?
'Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.' Prov. xxvi. 4.
'Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.' Prov. xxvi. 5.
Samuel Grant Oliphant
#81. "vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
G.K. Chesterton
#82. In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest, in real time.
James Fenton
#83. Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
#84. I was the solitary plover
a pencil
for a wing-bone
From the secret notes
I must tilt
upon the pressure
execute and adjust
In us sea-air rhythm
We live by the urgent wave
of the verse
Lorine Niedecker
#85. The record Clef and I did was just sitting there. So I said, Clef, I got a record, hit a verse on it. He just went in, messed around and ended up doing the hook too.
Pras Michel
#86. I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom
not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest.
Ovid
#87. Every morning
before the birds start
trilling me their stories,
I give birth to a new love
through my same old heart
when a lake's placidity
finds life in the swans breath
Only for you...
From the poem 'Only For You
Munia Khan
#88. Now turn to Matthew, tenth chapter, thirty-second verse: "Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven." There's the "I will" of confession.
D.L. Moody
#89. I've always loved the mixture of crushing live drums with a programmed groove, that really cool blend, like in the verse there's a really funky drum beat that is programmed then it comes in to the chorus; you've got that enormous human feel where the band kicks in.
Tommy Lee
#90. Try Galactus and Silver Surfer fusing together in the MC2-verse weird.
Larry Gent
#91. But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
Evelyn Waugh
#92. In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,
a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#93. Because Dad told you he'd be here forever.
Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.
Kwame Alexander
#94. Do not flatter yourselves with the belief that a mere recital of that celebrated verse in St. John makes a man a Christian.
Mahatma Gandhi
#95. Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter ... the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing
John Milton
#96. We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.
John Donne
#97. Elrick turned to the proper pages in the Broadman hymnal and gamely sang along to the first, second, and fourth verses. We always ignored the third verse like the crazy aunt in the attic that nobody ever talked about. I never knew why.
Brad Whittington
#98. I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields; Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. You with the unpaid bill, Despair, You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, I will pay you in the grave, Death will listen to your stave.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#99. ...only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.
Colum McCann
#100. To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
Florence King
