Top 100 Life And Poetry Quotes
#1. Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
#2. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#3. this life
has been
a landscape
of pain
and still,
flowers
bloom in it.
Sanober Khan
#4. Steep fall to the ground
shattering
like clay pigeons
missed
by bad shots
and unsteady hands.
Jessica Kristie
#5. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
#6. I am trying to both be happy and pay attention to the world around me. I do not know if it is possible to do both at the same time.
Blythe Baird
#7. Life, it turns out, isn't poetry! And do you know why? Because it's so resistant to criticism!
Andrzej Sapkowski
#9. When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on".
Fred Rogers
#10. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Jim Goetz
#11. some winters
will never melt
some summers
will never freeze
and some things will only
... live in poems.
Sanober Khan
#13. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.
Wanda Lea Brayton
#14. Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#15. I balance you
on the end of my pen.
Teetering between love
and letting go.
Jessica Kristie
#16. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Virginia Woolf
#17. This is my life and lovestory listen losely and hold on tight this a roller coaster hell of a ride
Patrick Cruz
#18. And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.
Nadege Richards
#19. The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.
Franz Grillparzer
#20. Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#21. Everything is an echo of something I once read.
Dream, hope, and celebrate life!
Love always comes back in a song.
One thing we all have in common is a love for food and drink.
Memories never die, and dreams never end!
What is time?
John Siwicki
#22. Fuck I hate fucks
Who think they're so fucking great
They know everything about fucking,
When they're just fucking fucks fucking!
And no one changes the fucking world
When they keep fucking to another fuck's fuck.
Initially NO
#23. Loneliness of heart
In the still of the night my heart doth cry out, who can hear it for time is far spent. In the darkness in the shadow of the depth I find isolation and fear ...
M.I. Ghostwriter
#24. It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
John Taylor Gatto
#25. Sometimes having little or no money makes you want to steal and live your life the only way you want to
Martellis Thurmand
#26. even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like.
N'Zuri Za Austin
#27. Life has sadness, joy, beauty, like poetry.
So be passionate and write a great story.
Debasish Mridha
#28. You are afraid to let anyone in, but you still leave the door open, hoping someone good will shut the door behind him and throw away the keys.
Jenim Dibie
#29. I've never seen beauty
so devastating
as in the lines
that trace our hope
and fall from the stars.
Jessica Kristie
#30. He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.
Subramanya Bharathi
#31. True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#32. Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death.
Santosh Kalwar
#33. A person who wants a pure and simple life can start a war within themselves and with society
Lisa C. Miller
#34. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#35. I build boxes
and place them at your feet,
to measure the distance
between dreams and reality.
Jessica Kristie
#36. I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
Zona Gale
#37. At the end of the day
all we ever need is
something
that helped
pass the time
and something
that keeps time from passing.
Sanober Khan
#38. If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
#39. They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer - some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky - are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one's life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.
Brenda Ueland
#40. I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
Ted Hughes
#41. A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is ... like a life without pictures.
Stephen King
#42. It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.
Frank O'Hara
#43. The words 'I Love You' kill, and resurrect millions, in less than a second.
Aberjhani
#44. I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
Erica Jong
#45. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#46. Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.
John Dryden
#47. Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
Natasha Trethewey
#48. It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
Billy Collins
#49. There are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
Charles Bukowski
#50. My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me ...
Lucy Larcom
#51. My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.
Stephen Malkmus
#52. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#53. Bleeding, idleness and mist, he murmured in an unusual mood of poetry.
It's like life, isn't it...
First the wound, then the resting, and then the uncertainty of it all.
Leon Garfield
#54. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
Sanober Khan
#55. Loving you is kissing the night, exposing the scars, words in flames, for every drop and for every life.
Gwen Calvo
#56. My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. 'Listen,' he said, 'life and no escape.
Anne Carson
#57. A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.
Aberjhani
#58. Some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we're all alive
tonight.
Charles Bukowski
#59. I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.
Butch Hancock
#60. I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.
Cheryl Mendelson
#61. Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall.
Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen
#62. So this is love:
the Sculptor's chisel.
And stone, which in its whole life
does not utter a single word,
suddenly sings.
Milan Rufus
#63. Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#64. Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.
Seamus Heaney
#65. Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Andrew Marvell
#66. Walking away ends a battle in the heart of one,
and starts a war in the soul of another.
Jenim Dibie
#67. We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.
Tanya R. Liverman
#68. I see the beauty in you, and the darkness. Both are brilliant.
Christina Strigas
#69. I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.
Gertrude Atherton
#70. A poetess is a collection of unfinished thoughts. She is a tormented phantom, a harbinger of life and death. Those who peer deep inside her catacombs will learn that even madness is a virtue.
Nichole McElhaney
#71. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.
George Steiner
#72. Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.
Peter S. Beagle
#73. Life is transitory... and love is poetry in action
Scarlet Risque
#74. Alive. This music rocks
me. I drive the interstate,
watch faces come and go on either
side. I am free to be sung to;
I am free to sing. This woman
can cross any line.
Joy Harjo
#75. Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
#76. Mother Earth, one of my absolute favorite places ... where the sounds, the energy, the beauty and the Life pounds into your every fiber of being, letting you Know that you are alive. I will always respect and honor this gift of creation that we call our home.
Peace Gypsy
#77. All paths lead to death,
our premature sacrifice for future spawn
(from Elixir)
Bryan Murphy
#78. I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.
Charles Bukowski
#79. How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.
Carol Shields
#80. I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.
Charles Bukowski
#81. And when you spoke to me, I did not know
That to my life's high altar came its priest.
Sara Teasdale
#82. Dreams are the poetry of life to be written with love and actions.
Debasish Mridha
#83. To be wild as the waves;
enshrined
by the vastness -
our cosmic immemorial.
Unsettled as the forest.
An indomitable flicker
amidst worldviews,
of jaded crowns
and romantic ash.
Steven Storm
#84. Oh, Youth may listen patiently,
While sad Experience tells her tale,
But Doubt sits smiling in his eye,
For ardent Hope will still prevail!
He hears how feeble Pleasure dies,
By guilt destroyed, and pain and woe;
He turns to Hope - and she replies,
Believe it not-it is not so!
Anne Bronte
#86. you are
as fleetingly beautiful
as a mother's tears
and a father's pranks
a brother's bachelorhood
and a best friend's bad mood
a bride's glittering jitters
and a handsome stranger's smile.
Sanober Khan
#87. Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.
E. E. Cummings
#88. Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre.
Terry A. O'Neal
#89. I'd gladly trade the world
And all of its gold,
To see you safe in this fragile life.
Maddy Kobar
#90. There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.
Richard Livingstone
#91. And that is the nature of us poets and whores, to make things hard: dicks, choices... life.
Nicole Lyons
#92. Superstition is the poetry of life. It is inherent in man's nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it takes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once, as soon as it can do it with safety.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#93. Poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths ...
John Geddes
#94. She slammed the door and
was gone.
I looked at the closed door
and at the doorknob
and strangely
I didn't feel
alone.
Charles Bukowski
#95. In that wounded place,
buried between
my ribs and letting go,
I miss you.
Jessica Kristie
#96. Time will tell if it was well spent.
Time will tell where all your ideas went.
Time will allow you to achieve your goals.
Time is too precious to put on hold.
Don't waste time on meaningless things.
Take advantage of its benefits and all life brings.
Bianca McCormick-Johnson
#97. Do you believe a man can truly love a woman and constantly betray her?Never mind physically but betray her in his mind,in the very "poetry of his soul".Well,it's not easy but men do it all the time.
Mario Puzo
#98. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#99. We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#100. With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.
Roman Payne
