Top 100 Quotes About Poets
#1. It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.
Pattiann Rogers
#2. She knows more of love than the poets can say, and her eyes offer something that won't go away.
Harry Chapin
#3. Glorious sex that poets write about and that angels blow their trumpets over absolutely requires the participants to be fully engaged and fully witnessing the entire event!
Roberto Hogue
#4. A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.
Jim Jarmusch
#5. Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.
Martin Espada
#6. We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
#7. I am not afraid to die because I know heaven is a place of artists, musicians and poets
Rassool Jibraeel Snyman
#8. Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.
Wislawa Szymborska
#9. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#10. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#11. I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
David Knopfler
#12. This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.
Patrick Rothfuss
#13. Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Robert Penn Warren
#14. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#15. To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.
Dan Simmons
#16. your smile.
is the ultimate
golden dream.
all the poems
in the world
are waking up from.
Sanober Khan
#17. People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
#18. We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream , and we won't let this world die without a fight.
Albert Camus
#19. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?
Martijn Benders
#20. The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.
Martin Heidegger
#21. When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
Philip Larkin
#22. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
#23. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
Anne Waldman
#24. All over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches,
Salman Rushdie
#25. If we go on as we are, we will destroy in the next century everything that the poets have been singing about for the past two thousand years.
Fred Bodsworth
#26. Poetry can take you places that were once only traveled by your imagination.
Delano Johnson
#27. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#28. No one lets dead poets lie in peace. We are like old meat on a crowded dinner table.
Steven Erikson
#30. Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.
George Farquhar
#31. Ireland is a land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.
Nora Roberts
#32. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#33. I wanted to live deep and suck out the all the marrow of life ( ... ).
Henry David Thoreau
#34. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob Dylan
#35. Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
Carolyn Kizer
#36. She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence ... they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good ...
Eva Ibbotson
#37. A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
Gustav Stresemann
#38. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle.
Dejan Stojanovic
#40. The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people that know the truth about us. Soldiers don't, statesmen don't, priests don't, union leaders don't ... only the poets.
James Baldwin
#41. All we're trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
#42. So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvres.
Wislawa Szymborska
#43. every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay.
AVA.
#45. And what does he have to say to the impressionable young student at his side? That all poets must eventually bow before the haiku. Bow before the haiku! Can you imagine." "For my part," contributed the Count, "I am glad that Homer wasn't born in Japan." Mishka
Amor Towles
#46. From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
Wallace Stevens
#47. Poets should be ashamed
To die
Before they kiss
The sun
Nikki Giovanni
#48. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#49. 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
#50. I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
Francine Prose
#51. Is it that important? Wouldn't it be more important to teach the least powerful? To help them make the most of what they do have? Should we teach only poets to read?
Rainbow Rowell
#52. i am changing
and i am loving change.
AVA.
#53. Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.
Marita Golden
#54. When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
Marv Levy
#55. Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry ...
Elizabeth Janeway
#56. We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.
Dejan Stojanovic
#57. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
#58. He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,
Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#59. As long as there are young people, and old people, too, who can imagine realities beyond seeing and touching, and as long as there are poets, and artists, and musicians, there will be unicorns.
Jack Clifford Smith
#62. In a way, women were asking for men to be poets and driving, passionate lovers at the same time.
Robert James Waller
#63. My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection.
Henry Rollins
#64. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#65. The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.
William Faulkner
#66. A poem in the heart is worth
more than a million dollars
in the bank account.
Sanober Khan
#67. A. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
Cynthia Ozick
#68. I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.
Edward Hirsch
#69. I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth ... in mine it begins to be loosened.
Walt Whitman
#71. This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.
Nikos Kazantzakis
#72. It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
Randall Jarrell
#73. At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.
Iggy Pop
#74. There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.
Dejan Stojanovic
#75. Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Anne Sexton
#76. The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.
John Burnside
#77. Failures of nerve and energy are not permitted. That's what it means to be an object.
Mary Kinzie
#78. I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.
Abraham Lincoln
#79. I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#81. Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
Henry Miller
#82. Go to the poets, they will speak to thee
More perfectly of purer creatures
William Wordsworth
#83. I want to stay there. I don't want to go any further. I want to stay. I can't remember who it was - one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein - who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.
Sofia Samatar
#84. He'd always assumed those ancient poets had been full of shit, or at least had much better drugs than he'd ever tried.
Kass Morgan
#85. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage
#86. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
#87. 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
#88. If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.
[Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris,
Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]
Horace
#89. GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.
Lisa Washington
#90. All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.
Haniel Long
#91. Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?
Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread,
By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?
George Crabbe
#94. They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
Howard Zinn
#95. Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
#96. Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.
Karl Shapiro
#97. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
#98. There have been many most excellent poets that have never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets.
Philip Sidney
#99. Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.
Bei Dao
#100. i would rather have
feelings without words
than words without feelings.
Sanober Khan
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