Poetry Quotes
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.Thomas Carlyle
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic
The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.L. Schefe
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.Socrates, In "Apology, " sct. 21, by Plato.
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.Jean Cocteau
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.William Wordsworth
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.Christopher Fry
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.John Adams
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.Johnson
We pass the word around we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry we meditate over the literature we play the music we change our minds we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.Lewis Thomas
Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose words in their best order - Poetry the best words in the best order.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.Kahlil Gibran
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.Henry David Thoreau
What is important - what lasts - In another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.Peter Brodie
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.Lewis Thomas
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.Donald E. Knuth
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.Frederick William Robertson
It is written on the arched sky It looks out from every star It is the poetry of Nature It is that which uplifts the spirit within us.John Ruskin
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.Oscar Wilde
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.John Ruskin
Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.John Masefield
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.T. S. Eliot
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.Socrates
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.Jean Giraudoux
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.M. C. Richards
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.Lord Byron
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream - A scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows - Is essentially poetry.Jesse Louis Jackson
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.Russell Bake
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.Bertrand Russell
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.Henry David Thoreau
