Top 100 Poetry Of Life Quotes
#1. Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.
Alex Ebert
#2. Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#3. There are two kinds of love. One kind you live with, the other you write poetry about.
Debasish Mridha
#4. this life
has been
a landscape
of pain
and still,
flowers
bloom in it.
Sanober Khan
#5. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#6. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
#7. Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.
Mahmoud Darwish
#8. 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
#9. There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen
Jessica-Lynn Barbour
#10. 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
#11. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#12. Reality is not made of dreams, until you make them real.
Soar
#13. Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#14. I balance you
on the end of my pen.
Teetering between love
and letting go.
Jessica Kristie
#15. Sometimes you know that you are destined to die, but somehow you are given a parenthesis after the punctuation mark: more years, more time that wasn't meant for you but still was meant for you, a bridge stretching out into the stars, a confidence built of invisible threads, a miracle.
Lene Fogelberg
#16. She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
David Nicholls
#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. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
Carl Sandburg
#20. Everything is connected. We see the signs every moment. There are miracles waiting to happen!
Avijeet Das
#21. The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.
Franz Grillparzer
#22. 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
#23. How light the raindrop's contents are;
how gently the world touches me.
From View With a Grain of Sand
Wislawa Szymborska
#24. Like a speeding train
I am passing by...
I don't know
where I'm heading
with whom or why
all I know is that
I will never, ever
pass from here again
all I know is I'm skidding forward
on this track of life.
Sanober Khan
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Sometimes having little or no money makes you want to steal and live your life the only way you want to
Martellis Thurmand
#29. 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
#30. You can't build a life
on another human being. We're foundations
of sand. We're Atlas buckling under the sky.
Elisabeth Hewer
#31. May the energy of the day always call for celebration. Barbara Botch
Barbara Botch
#32. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Terence McKenna
#34. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!
Anne Carson
#35. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I find it incredibly amazing how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade. No cloud is ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece. A new wonder. A new memory.
Sanober Khan
#39. I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
Zona Gale
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#46. 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
#47. 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
#49. If the colour of life turns grey turn the palette the other way
Benny Bellamacina
#50. Sometimes life requires more of you than you have to give & demands you plunge into the reinvention of yourself if you truly wanna live.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I believe in reverencing anything in the life of man which has the testimony of the ages as being unexcelled, whether it be literature, paintings, poetry, tombs -- even a golf hole.
C.B. MacDonald
#54. Life is never beautiful, but only the pictures of life are so in the transfiguring mirror of art or poetry; especially in youth, when we do not yet know it. Many a youth would receive great peace of mind if one could assist him to this knowledge.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#56. I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.
Shelby Lynne
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
#60. 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
#61. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things.
J.D. Salinger
#62. he pays his respect
by smiling at you
when others are looking
how he calls you a bitch
right after is truly amazing
Ymatruz
#63. 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
#64. this heart yearns...
for the salt of unsmelt air
unswept thunderstorms...
unknown adventures.
Sanober Khan
#65. I long for
a little life,
an everyday life,
a splash of sunlight
through a window
a smile from a stranger -
a heart to hold in mine.
Menna Van Praag
#66. 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
#67. Poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry.
John Hollander
#69. She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.
Louis Untermeyer
#70. since the hardships of life is what has made me strong, instead of living with regrets--I'm thankful for what went wrong
Jason Frisby
#71. 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
#72. I give a damn if any fan recalls my legacy, I'm trying to live life in the sight of GOD's memory.
Mos Def
#73. 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
#74. Love Was
Love Will Be
But Most of All,
Love is.
Life Cannot Be Without It
It is found in the Womb
In The Woods
In The Stars.
To Be or Not to Be
To Love, or not to Love
They Are Equal.
My Soul Whispers Into the Spaces.
Yes.
Cindy Martinusen Coloma
#75. Walking away ends a battle in the heart of one,
and starts a war in the soul of another.
Jenim Dibie
#77. The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.
Kevin Hart
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Life is transitory... and love is poetry in action
Scarlet Risque
#82. I have no life but this,
To lead it here;
Nor any death, but lest
Dispelled from there;
Nor tie to earths to come,
Nor action new,
Except through this extent,
The realm of you.
Emily Dickinson
#83. Of everything
I have ever endured,
Y
O
U
are
My Favourite Tragedy.
Meraaqi
#84. 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
#85. In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.
Mary Ruefle
#86. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#88. Poetry as Initiation
Every poem embraces our passion to connect
its reader to snippets of knowledge
that have become life-giving to us.
Poems go beyond simple sharing to initiation,
beyond the need to express
to the urgency to edify.
Beryl Dov
#89. In the shade of words sits life itself.
Aisha Mirza
#90. 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
#91. With heaven in our hearts,
life is romancing us
with glimpses of
the universe dancing.
Ann Louise Ramsey
#92. Dreams are the poetry of life to be written with love and actions.
Debasish Mridha
#94. 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
#96. But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.
Henry David Thoreau
#97. Tell me..how do you stand there?
filling the doorway....of my life.
Sanober Khan
#98. 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
#99. Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre.
Terry A. O'Neal
#100. Drop the mind that thinks in prose; revive another kind of mind that thinks in poetry Put aside all your expertise in syllogism; let songs be your way of life. Move from intellect to intuition, from the head to the heart, because the heart is closer to the mysteries.
Osho
