Top 100 Quotes About Poets
#2. Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.
Charles Baudelaire
#3. I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.
Carol Ann Duffy
#4. Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.
Joseph Joubert
#5. I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them
I don't believe they are as eternal as the poets say.
Henry James
#6. Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.
Bill Alexander
#8. Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
#9. I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
Tom Waits
#10. We poets have no need for drugs to attain the borderline between life and death.
Louis Malle
#11. Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.
David McCullough
#12. Poets are far rarer birds than kings.
Ben Jonson
#13. There was a tendency by some to romanticize love, to make a fetish out of it. The poets made love seem like a bar of iron coming out of the furnace at the blacksmith's, red hot and staying so forever. Soto did not think much of such notions.
Ken Liu
#15. I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It's definitely one of my greatest joys, and I'm a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.
Jandy Nelson
#16. Few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
Stanley Kunitz
#17. Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
Oscar Wilde
#19. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
Adam Gopnik
#20. We want to be poets of our life - first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
Marguerite Young
#22. I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
Felix Dennis
#23. Poets and monks ... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
Kathleen Norris
#24. Great poets are all philosophers too profound to systematize their ideas. Inside every dark visionary is a being of insidious reason waiting patiently for his host to die. From the cleft of the creative arises the categorical flower.
Alex Stein
#25. Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.
Jules Verne
#27. Mere poets are sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet.
John Dryden
#28. Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks / Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks / The founder's you; the table is this place / The carvers we; the prologue is the grace / Each act a course, each scene, a different dish.
George Farquhar
#29. In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
Muriel Rukeyser
#30. The sensuality of desperate lives. Only poets talk like that. But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does it bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.
Jean-Claude Izzo
#31. But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Robert Graves
#33. Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.
Joseph Campbell
#34. Poets, with no sponsors, no agenda, are the truest form of freedom today, bleeding out every drop of themselves for the world to either hate or devour.
Jason E. Hodges
#35. For me, fishing and journalism touched the same places in my head. In comparison with that of poets, the fly fishers' and the journalists' experiences are probably pale flavors, but they carry nonetheless a hint of ambrosia.
Howell Raines
#36. A cheerful genius suits the times, / And all true poets laugh unquenchably / Like Shakespeare and the gods.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#37. [On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets ...
Maria Edgeworth
#38. The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
Sigmund Freud
#41. I bleed myself to be your drink:
Is not the blood of poets - ink?
William Soutar
#42. A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people.
John McGahern
#44. Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.
James Fenton
#45. In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
Alfred Marshall
#46. Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
Craig Brown
#47. O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman's gaze ...
William Butler Yeats
#48. And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.
Len G. Murray
#49. Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets,
Walt Whitman
#50. The seasons will go on without us and other poets will speak of love
Bruce Meyer
#51. You poets are accustomed to finding words for everything beautiful and you don't even grant that people have hearts if they are less talkative about their feelings than you.
Hermann Hesse
#52. I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.
Carolyn Kizer
#53. The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#54. All men owe honor to the poets - honor and awe; for they are dearest to the Muse who puts upon their lips the ways of life.
Homer
#55. The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
Lactantius
#56. Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
Carol Ann Duffy
#57. I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.
Dorothy Fields
#58. It may be that hidden in the poets and writers we love best is a vital clue about the heaven we are aiming for; that we should stay with and return often and with confidence to those lines and images that have most inspired us, even from our childhood.
Malcolm Guite
#59. And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
Elizabeth Bishop
#60. It was likely, then that this - -this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field- - meant death. Death - -the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point.
C.S. Lewis
#61. Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.
Jose Marti
#62. If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?
Galileo Galilei
#63. Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
Donald Hall
#64. Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.
Upton Sinclair
#65. Poets can't worry about popularity since loving life and humanity involves saying what some people don't want to hear.
Vanna Bonta
#66. They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously?' he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, 'That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.
A.S. Byatt
#67. Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
Edmund Waller
#68. The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#69. I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver
#70. How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do"
"Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#71. I think most poets are natural witnesses and were curious about everything.
Allison Hedge Coke
#72. Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.
Henry Rollins
#73. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.
Denis De Rougemont
#74. The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians ...
Barbara Tuchman
#75. The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
Helen Dunmore
#76. Grave authors say, and witty poets sing, That honest wedlock is a glorious thing.
Alexander Pope
#77. When we talk to somebody and we want to be nice or polite or show our more beautiful side, we try to use the best words that we know. This is what poets are doing. They are cleaning the words, they are inventing the sentiments, they are giving us a way to communicate.
Roberto Benigni
#78. It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.
Gary Zukav
#79. Prince or commoner, tenor or bass,
Painter or plumber or never-do-well,
Do me a favor and shut your face -
Poets alone should kiss and tell.
Dorothy Parker
#80. Poets heap virtues, painters gems, at will, And show their zeal, and hide their want of skill.
Alexander Pope
#81. Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.
Joyce Cary
#82. It's sad to see Time's toothless mouth laughing the poets to scorn. The stars are all explained and the mist is all measured, and there is no magic left in this dreary world.
Mark Forsyth
#83. The way I process things, they way I express myself, is in comics, just as poets process things that they are trying to understand.
Ellen Forney
#84. Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.
Steven Heighton
#86. I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
Robert Wyatt
#87. That is why they have poets - to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.
Sarah Ruhl
#88. I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.
Roy Harper
#89. Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?
Eugene H. Peterson
#90. We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.
Tom Robbins
#91. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad ... mathematicians go mad.
G.K. Chesterton
#92. Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.
Robert Lowell
#93. Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
John Barton
#94. Poets and children," said Sylvan. "We are the same really. When you can't find a poet, find a child. Remember that.
Patricia MacLachlan
#95. Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes
John Naughton
#96. Almost everybody considers himself capable of thinking and, to a certain degree, whether right or wrong, really does think. Very few, on the contrary, can fancy themselves poets or artists in words. But from the moment when thought won out over style, the mob invaded the novel.
Albert Camus
#97. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
Philip Sidney
#98. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud
#100. Oh yes, children often commit murders. And quite clever ones, too. Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who are going to make great names for themselves, start amazingly early ... Like mathematicians and musicians. Poets develop later.
John Lee Mahin
