Top 100 Poetry Music Quotes
#1. Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude
they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.
Herb Elliott
#2. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
Edgar Allan Poe
#3. A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.
Pope Benedict XVI
#4. I am from the Mediterranean area, I have to feel everything. I am a physical person, but I guess that things that you cannot touch and cannot see are also touchable and visible - light, poetry, music.
Jaume Plensa
#5. All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man
Bernard Berenson
#6. As in art, poetry, music, etc., the best theology is worked out in pain
Steve Chalke
#7. Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
#8. In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
Renzo Piano
#9. There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
Jean De La Bruyere
#10. He could guide anyone to the point of no return. He'd corral them with poetry, music, invoking the alcoholic gods that all died young. But we were so young, we didn't know we had anything we would miss.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
#11. Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don't know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason's sign, they reveal the initiated to each other.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#12. Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.
Elie Wiesel
#13. Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.
Christian Louboutin
#14. The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
Michelle Obama
#15. The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#16. Making of poetry, music, dance and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit.
Mark McMorris
#17. Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. We can look forward to four more years of wonderful, inspirational speeches full of wit, poetry, music, love and affection, plus more goddamn nonsense.
David Brinkley
#19. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#20. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#21. Let my name perish,
the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,
and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.
Sidney Lanier
#23. Poetry was a barrier against raw
emotions. It distilled them into bearable
music, allowed one to accommodate them
a little at a time.
Alexander Moncrieffe
Julie Anne Long
#24. He offered his love ... she could not bother,
She gives her love to the other! The other!
E.A. Bucchianeri
#26. I love films. I love music. I love poetry and stories. All of that I feel ... I sort of get very excited and fed by.
Ben Whishaw
#27. For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
Cornel West
#28. Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
Joan Didion
#29. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#30. Music gives inspiration ... one that sounds windy with humming sound, such can put you in a trance, only to come back and discover some witty ideas.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#31. In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night ... starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.
Jim Morrison
#32. I like putting common expressions next to uncommon expressions. I'm sure in Poetry 101 there is a name for it, but it seems like you usually go one way or the other in rock music.
Dan Bejar
#33. Poetry and music I have banished,
But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Makes no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.
William Butler Yeats
#34. For each of us is
A separate miracle
In a collective miracle
Brought together
For a moment
By a group of notes
And a scan of words
From the heart
Of one
Who dares
To think
That others
Might feel
As he feels
Leonard Nimoy
#35. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
#36. Shall I tell you our secret? We are charming thieves who steal hearts and never fail because we are the friends of the One.
Blessed is the poem that comes through me but not of me because the sound of my own music will drown the song of Love.
Rumi
#37. I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
Michael Graves
#38. There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.
Edward Hirsch
#39. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#40. I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
Paul Simon
#41. Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.
Atticus
#42. The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Charles Darwin
#43. Let us then blend everything: love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry.
Madame De Stael
#44. Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.
Robert James Waller
#45. I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.
Charles Wright
#46. The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.
Henry David Thoreau
#47. I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
#48. Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.
Ben Fountain
#49. Like sunlight under their skins, they want to be loved from the poem STAY in RidingTheEscalator
Jay Woodman
#50. Be my sonata, my cantata, my love
sing me something sweet
but not too sweet
(or i may grow deaf to our harmony
as we decrescendo into silence)
Nenia Campbell
#51. The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.
Robert Aris Willmott
#52. Poetry reading is the chamber music of the actor's craft.
Robert Lacey
#53. In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.
Albert Einstein
#54. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#56. The trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments ... it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst.
Hector Berlioz
#57. The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.
Mark Knopfler
#58. Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.
L.M. Elliott
#59. When the words have been said and the music has been played, feelings
are the only form of art which will remain to reign.
Soar
#60. I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate
and volatile
I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.
Joanne Harris
#61. Be aroused by poetry; structure yourself with propriety, refine yourself with music.
Confucius
#62. Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up.
Deborah Meyler
#63. I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.
Paul Valery
#64. One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
Stephen Sondheim
#65. 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
#66. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.
Barack Obama
#67. There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.
Yanni
#68. Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!
Dmitri Shostakovich
#69. Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
Stephen Sondheim
#70. Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.
Will Durant
#71. I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.
Louise Jameson
#72. Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.
David Lee Roth
#73. There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.
Umberto Boccioni
#74. I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.
Criss Jami
#75. What science cannot declare, art can suggest; what art suggests silently, poetry speaks aloud; but what poetry fails to explain in words, music can express.
Whoever knows the mystery of vibrations indeed knows all things.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#76. Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.
Nikki Giovanni
#77. What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.
Fernand Leger
#78. I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys.
Clive Sinclair
#79. Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
Andres Segovia
#81. The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare's day.
Mark Lamonica
#82. Meditation is the most significant because it opens the door for all other significant things: love, prayer, God, light, music, poetry.
Rajneesh
#83. Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
Colin Wilson
#84. 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
#85. Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.
Pattiann Rogers
#86. Songwriting and poetry are so commonly birthed from underdogs because one can make even the ugliest situations admirable, or more beautiful than the beautiful situations - they are the most graceful media in which the lines of society are distorted.
Criss Jami
#87. Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#89. The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#90. For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Eugenio Montale
#91. The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.
Curt Sachs
#92. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#93. Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music.
Benjamin Clementine
#94. The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#95. You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.
Fred Durst
#96. I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.
John Quincy Adams
#97. A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#98. Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound
#99. Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
Victor Hugo
#100. Poetry ... is the music and painting of the mind.
Sonia Orwell
