Poetry Quotes
Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.Henrik Ibsen, Norweigen Playwright
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.Adrian Mitchell
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
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
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
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.Frederick William Robertson
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.Martin Luther King, Jr.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.Robert Frost
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.Jean Giraudoux
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.Mario Cuomo
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.Lord Byron
Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.John Keats
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 in poetry.Bertrand Russell
Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
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
Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large - How large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce - How scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.Alfred North Whitehead
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.Thomas Carlyle
Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.Beverly Nichols
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.Stephen Leacock, 1912
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.Oscar Wilde
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.Christopher Fry
Poetry the best words in the best order.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Courtly love - Poetry may first have been written during long periods of abstinence on the Crusades, but it would not have flourished in the cold of northern Europe without some help from the chimney.James Burke
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.Plato
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.R. Z. Sheppard, book critic
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)
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 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
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.Oscar Wilde
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.Virginia
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.Emily Dickinson
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
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.Martin Luther King, Jr.
