Top 100 World Poetry Quotes
#1. If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Muriel Rukeyser
#2. Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.
Aberjhani
#3. If everyone read the poetry of Pablo Neruda we'd be a more peaceful, reflective world. Poetry can save lives.
Laura Moe
#4. Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Archibald MacLeish
#5. Although I was quiet as a child, I had this resistless passion inside of me-this need and hunger to create my own world. Poetry filled that void, and its words fed that vital necessity of ownership.
Masiela Lusha
#6. In most of the world, poetry has such a different reputation than it does in Western culture.
Eliza Griswold
#7. There's poetry in the world. Poetry doesn't belong just to the poets. You know, you can look at the most premeditated, cold blooded movie and find poetry in it.
Francesco Clemente
#8. Poetry fights against the injustice of this world. Poetry's truths are ageless.
Delano Johnson
#10. May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
E. E. Cummings
#11. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#12. your smile.
is the ultimate
golden dream.
all the poems
in the world
are waking up from.
Sanober Khan
#13. Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Dylan Thomas
#14. I am trying to both be happy and pay attention to the world around me. I do not know if it is possible to do both at the same time.
Blythe Baird
#15. It still is on the run,
time that is.
Sometimes it seems like everything's changing;
my whole world is rearranging.
Everything's different,
and yet everything's the same.
Time is just a crazy game.
Amanda Leigh
#16. Let us remember ... that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.
Christian Wiman
#18. If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.
Eileen Myles
#19. Autumn Dusk
I saw above a sea of hills
A solitary planet shine,
And there was no one, near or far,
to keep the world from being mine.
Sara Teasdale
#20. TOMORROW'S WILL
Silent world, I find myself,
Glad no one hears my thoughts.
In dark cocoon, I hibernate,
Yet spirit spills every thought.
A second chance to try again.
The risks I know too well.
Two sunsets turning into six-
Awaits tomorrow's will.
Giorge Leedy
#21. It is so hard to stay afloat in a world
that just wants to drown you.
Schuyler Peck
#22. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#23. 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
#24. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#25. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.
Richard Ronald Allan
#26. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#27. The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments. He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. While the world has found the right names for all chronic mental diseases, I believe poetry is also a brain dysfunction, yet the only one that owns itself the mastery for the cure. Isn't it lovely to say, "He/She suffers of Poetry?".
Ioana-Cristina Casapu
#29. How light the raindrop's contents are;
how gently the world touches me.
From View With a Grain of Sand
Wislawa Szymborska
#30. There is an Arabic writer who wrote philosophy and poetry and who brought all religions and all the world together.
Salma Hayek
#31. Cotton rows crisscross the world
And dead-tired nights of yearning
Thunderbolts on leather strops
And all my body burning
Sugar cane reach up to God
And every baby crying
Shame a blanket of my night
And all my days are dying
Maya Angelou
#32. I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
Luc Delahaye
#33. Fuck I hate fucks
Who think they're so fucking great
They know everything about fucking,
When they're just fucking fucks fucking!
And no one changes the fucking world
When they keep fucking to another fuck's fuck.
Initially NO
#34. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. I believe the world is beautiful, and poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
Roque Dalton
#36. There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
#38. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#39. I hate the very noise of troublous man
Who did and does me all the harm he can.
Free from the world I would a prisoner be
And my own shadow all my company.
John Clare
#40. Illegibility
of this world. All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify
the splitting hour,
hoarsely.
You , clamped
into your deepest part,
climb out of yourself
for ever.
Paul Celan
#41. She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.
Carol Ann Duffy
#42. Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy.
Nizar Qabbani
#43. Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
#44. We were all born to the same world but with much greater circumstance
but with these two hands and what I have been given
I will build so much more
from Dexterity
K.R. Albers
#45. 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
#46. Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.
Henry Petroski
#47. Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
Jeanette Winterson
#48. It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.
Helen Bevington
#49. Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.
Atticus
#50. Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
#51. If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
William Stafford
#52. Oh what a long time we shall not be and the world will endure,
Neither name nor sign of us will exist;
Before this we were not and there was no deficiency,
After this, when we are not it will be the same as before.
Omar Khayyam
#53. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
Ocean Vuong
#54. I am waiting for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe for anarchy
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#55. If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
John Barton
#56. ...now open your mind by closing your eyes
see the unseen world within you which lies
From the poem 'The Unseen World
Munia Khan
#57. To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
E. E. Cummings
#58. Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B.Yeats
#59. Float beyond the world of trees. Out into the whispering breeze, past the rushes, past the weeds, past the marsh's waving reeds.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#60. A few drinks and the world was hers -
she wore her whiskey like a loaded gun.
Atticus Poetry
#61. She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.
Edmond De Goncourt
#62. I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
Grace Paley
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.
Dejan Stojanovic
#66. Be you.
That, my friend,
is the change you want
to become in the world.
Frederick Espiritu
#67. After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
#68. A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.
Aberjhani
#69. 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
#70. This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot
#71. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
William Shakespeare
#72. the time will come, my dear
when I will hold you close
and all will be
right again
in the world.
Sanober Khan
#73. Then all the charm
Is broken
all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#74. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
Milan Kundera
#75. There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
Rupert Brooke
#76. We each bring our own unique beauty to the world, and how blessed we are to have the freedom to find that beauty in each other.
Heather K. O'Hara
#77. Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Andrew Marvell
#78. I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
Alice Eve
#79. No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of.
Sinclair Lewis
#80. The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.
Dejan Stojanovic
#81. O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,
Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;
But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
John Clare
#82. You cross the field in the snow leaving tracks in perfect whiteness ... disturbing my placid universe ... marking the landscape within me ...
John Geddes
#83. I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
Russell Baker
#84. Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey.
Chad Harbach
#85. One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.
Kevin Sampsell
#86. Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely ... It is simply the most ordinary place in the world ... It was so shabby and makeshift ... a place where poetry could never occur.
David Malouf
#87. Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world - Los Angeles in the '50s - they made perfect sense.
Wanda Coleman
#88. To have been where you have been
And to still have joy,
Dazzling in your heart,
Now there's a thing to make the whole world smile.
Scott Hastie
#89. It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso
Patsy Asuncion
#90. Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Octavio Paz
#91. Your world is as big as you make it.
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner,
My wings pressing close to my side.
Georgia Douglas Johnson
#92. Never lose hope, my heart, miracles dwell in the invisible. If the whole world turns against you keep your eyes on the Friend.
Rumi
#93. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also, what they have not.
this strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. If I could have one friend,
just one in all the world,
I know that I would not seek out
a boy or pretty girl.
The friend I'd dare to choose
to stand by me each day
would be a dragon fierce enough
to scare the world away.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#95. I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.
Criss Jami
#96. That amazing thing doesn't need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.
Clive James
#97. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#98. I'd gladly trade the world
And all of its gold,
To see you safe in this fragile life.
Maddy Kobar
#99. If I could get that girl to publish her poetry, the world would change. (On Courtney Love)
Kurt Cobain
#100. Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
