Top 100 Poetry And Quotes
#1. I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#2. Don't write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.
Lucille Clifton
#3. Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.
Ben Lerner
#4. Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
Pat Conroy
#5. People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.
Rene Magritte
#6. I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.
Barry Eisler
#7. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth.
Sarah Kay
#8. Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences, like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to.
Peter Block
#9. Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.
Aberjhani
#10. If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
Donald Hall
#11. Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
Nicholas Royle
#12. The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath
#13. Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
Florence Nightingale
#14. I want Poetry and Power and the young men who create it.
James Goldman
#15. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:
Virginia Woolf
#16. I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
Taylor Momsen
#17. I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.
Kevin Powers
#18. You can't be wrong in journalism. Take a wrong turn in journalism, and you are writing fiction. You can take a wrong turn in poetry, and something wonderful can happen.
Eliza Griswold
#19. Faith is mind at its best, its bravest, and its fiercest. Faith is thought become poetry, and absorbing into itself the soul's great, passions. Faith is intellect carried up to its transfigurement.
Charles Henry Parkhurst
#20. I love poetry and my country above all else in the world,
Fyodor Tyutchev
#21. An intelligent man, a man who has a little meditative consciousness, can make his life a beautiful piece of art, can make it so full of love and full of music and full of poetry and full of dance that there are no limitations for it. Life is not hard. It is man's stupidity that makes it hard.
Rajneesh
#22. The moon is more interesting than the unchanging sun. That is surely why it is used in poetry and the sun is not - unless one talks of dawn or dusk, when the sun briefly hovers on the edge of day.
Liza Dalby
#23. Level, they use this as a poor excuse to disregard the rules of the sharia. Drinking, dancing, music, poetry, and painting
Elif Shafak
#24. I urge you to be teachers so that you can join with children as the co-collaborators in a plot to build a little place of ecstasy and poetry and gentle joy
Jonathan Kozol
#25. I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
#26. INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
Ambrose Bierce
#27. When science drove the gods out of nature, they took refuge in poetry and the porticos of civic buildings.
Mason Cooley
#28. I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other words. I also used to describe at great length the way people in the area lived.
Hassan Blasim
#29. Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#30. I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.
Virginia Woolf
#31. One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.
Benjamin Haydon
#33. You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.
Donald Miller
#34. 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
#35. There are a couple of utterly important rules to writing anything, whether it's a novel, a short story or a collection of poetry. And they're really the only rules.
1: Quit talking about it and start.
2: Focus and finish it.
Nicholas Trandahl
#36. My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law.
Robert Schumann
#37. You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,
Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy
Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.
Callimachus
#38. What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.
Peter Brodie
#39. The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
Colm Toibin
#40. A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
Julio Cortazar
#41. I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.
Philippe Petit
#42. Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
Guy Davenport
#43. Childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.
John Piper
#44. Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.
Leon Black
#45. Don't be so quick to count out the teenagers. Some of the world's greatest changes, brilliant poetry, and innovations have come from the teenage mind.
Steve Maraboli
#46. I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
Shelby Foote
#47. I got saved by poetry and I got saved by the beauty of the world.
Mary Oliver
#48. I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life.
Lin Yutang
#49. Wasn't it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was?
Anne Rice
#50. There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.
Charles Baxter
#51. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.
Bertrand Russell
#52. Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better).
G.H. Hardy
#53. Now, I do say, "It's possible. You might be the first. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the odds are very much against you." All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.
Edward Hirsch
#54. Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'
Quincy Jones
#55. I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science.
Lorrie Moore
#56. I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.
Clive James
#57. Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.
Roger Rosenblatt
#58. Art is a reflection of poetry and beauty of the heart and mind without the use of any words.
Debasish Mridha
#59. Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
Mahmoud Darwish
#60. The flame that is naturally clear always gives the most light and heat. If I could blend my talent for poetry and music into one, the light would burn still clearer, and I might go far.
Robert Schumann
#61. My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.
Garth Greenwell
#62. Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.
James Crumley
#63. ...passions, poetry and the ego have been seen as perpetual explosions? But if that's true, then so its its opposite; ever since that August when athe mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbolic only of absolute negation.
Italo Calvino
#64. A clear mind can appreciate the beauty of poetry and the wisdom imparted in a story;
Anonymous
#66. The collective love for music and poetry and just the brotherhood of sound. And it's still kind of flowing through me and I attribute that to the team.
Anthony Kiedis
#67. Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones.
George MacDonald
#68. If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.
Richard Grossman
#69. Wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons. Is
Alan W. Watts
#70. My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.
Julia Margaret Cameron
#71. When I rap, I get to express myself in a way where putting words together is like poetry, and sometimes it's better to talk in certain expressions than sing, you know? So I love, I love to rhyme when I want to express certain things.
Wyclef Jean
#72. At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world
Muriel Barbery
#73. What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.
Andrea Bocelli
#74. When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.
James Arthur
#75. People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
Lucille Clifton
#76. Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?
Franz Grillparzer
#77. Though what is 'Romeo and Juliet' after all?" he added after a short pause. "The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all the rest of us.
Anton Chekhov
#78. Everything in life is either science or poetry... And sometimes, just sometimes, a thing is both.
Katandra Jackson Nunnally
#79. Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
Wallace Stevens
#80. You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
Alfred North Whitehead
#81. A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. Fiction - and poetry and drama - cleanse the doors of perception.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#83. I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.
Mary Szybist
#84. If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.
John F. Kennedy
#85. Why can't fellows be allowed to do what they like when they like and as they like, instead of other fellows sitting on banks and watching them all the time and making remarks and poetry and things about them?
Kenneth Grahame
#86. The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
Audre Lorde
#87. 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
#88. I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Maya Angelou
#89. I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#90. The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#91. Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.
Jay-Z
#92. I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible. In grade school, I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.
Amanda Plummer
#93. If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
Philippe Petit
#94. I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
Emilio Estevez
#95. Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
Clive James
#97. Uncomplicated joy and sorrow is not matter for philosophy, but rather for the simpler kinds of poetry and music.
Bertrand Russell
#98. 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
#99. We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
#100. I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
Keith Haring
