Top 100 Poet And Quotes
#2. Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth.
Edmondo De Amicis
#3. If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.
Countee Cullen
#4. In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.
John D'Agata
#5. Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#6. Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.
Howard Nemerov
#7. There were moments of despondency when Shakespeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael no painter; when the greatest wits have doubted the excellence of their happiest efforts.
Charles Caleb Colton
#8. Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.
Neil Gaiman
#9. Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance
Philip Larkin
#10. The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.
Harold Rosenberg
#11. How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.
William Davenant
#12. You want to be a poet and not die.
Erica Jong
#13. As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.
Ali Liebegott
#14. I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I'm also a poet and have had work in the 'Spectator.'
Maurice Flanagan
#15. I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.
Jessye Norman
#16. There are people who want to know about everything in the minutest detail, like accountants or lawyers. But show a toe sticking out of a hole in a sock to a poet and it is enough to produce an image of the whole world in him.
Tarkovsky
#17. We can understand poetry from a billion - in a billion styles, experiment, tradition, combination, spice, meter, image. It's all there for the poet and for the listener and for all of us.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#18. What are we singers but the silver-voiced messengers of the poet and the musician?
Nellie Melba
#19. There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Emile Zola
#20. I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.
Robert Hass
#21. I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
Edward Albee
#22. Dr. Urbino replied without looking at her: "I did not know that fellow was a poet." And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things, his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#23. If I can only be known as one thing, then, well, I guess it would be poet and performer and teacher.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#24. My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.
Frances Hardinge
#25. I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.
Leonard Cohen
#27. There is no moral to my song,
I praise no right, I blame no wrong;
I tell of things that I have seen,
I show the man that I have been
As simply as a poet can
Who knows himself poet and man.
Thomas MacDonagh
#28. I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U.S. poet and writer, 1943- )
Nikki Giovanni
#30. Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of 'thinker', with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won't really do.
Robert Webb
#31. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
Langston Hughes
#32. The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper
E. O. Wilson
#33. As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.
Philip Schultz
#34. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
William Blake
#35. An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.
Marlon Brando
#37. I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.
Roger Zelazny
#38. Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.
Roger McGough
#39. Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
Leonard Bernstein
#40. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.
Mark Forsyth
#41. I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#42. I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
Tennessee Williams
#43. You don't have to flay him with it. He's the son of a poet and has the soul of a bard.
Teal Ceagh
#44. Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
William Butler Yeats
#45. When I have had enough of tears and love, I turn to some poet, and set out again for a new world.
Xavier De Maistre
#46. Mr. Rihani is a man of ardent poetic temperament, a clever poet, and a man of unworldly ideals.
Edwin Markham
#47. The difference between a poet and a philosopher is that the poet sees logically and describes basically the beauty whereas the philosopher defines the basics and shows the beauty of logics.
Anuj
#48. Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.
Pat Conroy
#49. Folks say I've never been quite right since - but they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so rare in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry.
L.M. Montgomery
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Words are heavy in Turkey, and every writer, every poet and every journalist knows that, because of a word, because of a sentence, because of a tweet or even a retweet, you can be sued, you can be demonized by the media and you can even land in prison.
Elif Safak
#53. There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE.
David Hume
#54. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#55. IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
Ambrose Bierce
#56. When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
Raymond Queneau
#57. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him
C.S. Lewis
#58. What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.
Walter Scott
#59. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am I.
E. M. Forster
#60. Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#61. The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
Thomas Hardy
#62. And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
Virginia Woolf
#63. 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
#64. I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
Howard Nemerov
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. As Maya Angelou, American author, poet, and self-described Renaissance Woman, wrote, Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
L.R. Knost
#69. And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Norman MacCaig
#71. For what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?
Ouida
#72. 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
#73. Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master ... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Charles Bukowski
#74. A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#75. A man sees only what concerns him ... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
Henry David Thoreau
#76. The zealous display the strength of their belief, while the judicious show the grounds of it. - WILLIAM SHENSTONE, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POET AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNER
Josh Kaufman
#77. I watched in silence as the parts of Matthew I knew and loved - the poet and the scientist, the warrior and the spy, the Renaissance prince and the father - fell away until only the darkest, most forbidding part of him remained. He was only the assassin now. But he was still the man I loved.
Deborah Harkness
#78. I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
Bob Dylan
#80. According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
Allen Tate
#81. The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#82. I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.
Mary Shelley
#83. According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader".
Chris Kraus
#85. Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.
Robert Adamson
#86. Ego cannot bring anything extraordinary into the world; the extraordinary comes only through egolessness. And so is the case with the musician and the poet and the dancer. So is the case with everybody.
Rajneesh
#87. We are the total of our longings, he had written. But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#88. Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
Natasha Trethewey
#89. What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.
Vincent Buranelli
#90. Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.
Anais Nin
#91. For me, the intent in a song is to sing it. I compose songs, meaning I'm writing words to be set to music; I'm intending it to not be recited. I'm a singer-songwriter, and I'm a poet, and there really isn't a contradiction, at least for me.
Cornelius Eady
#92. One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
Umberto Eco
#93. I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
Joe Haldeman
#94. I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.
Aleister Crowley
#95. As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
Edgar Allan Poe
#96. I know not that there is anything in nature more soothing to the mind than the contemplation of the moon, sailing, like some planetary bark, amidst a sea of bright azure. The subject is certainly hackneyed; the moon has been sung by poet and poetaster. Is there any marvel that it should be so?
William Gilmore Simms
#97. I am a lover of love and I am a lover of words, and the two together spin visions of airy castles, but also may pierce the heart of hope. And so I remind you that I am a fool, a poet, and what matters is reality, not lovely words. Words are full of promise, yet empty of matter.
Waylon H. Lewis
#98. The thing I've learned writing my book is that everyone has the potential to be a poet, and all of our lives are epic.
Jonathan Heatt
#99. Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#100. David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic.
Geraldine Brooks
