Poetry Quotes

Poetry the best words in the best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

R. Z. Sheppard, book critic

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

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Boris Pasternak

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

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Kahlil Gibran

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

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

William Wordsworth

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 and say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King Jr.

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

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

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

M. C. Richards

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.

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

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Thomas Carlyle

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

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.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Havelock Ellis

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

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Oscar Wilde

Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Lord Byron

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

In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

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

Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

Henrik Ibsen, Norweigen Playwright

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

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

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - But not without poetry.

Charles Baudelaire

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

All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)

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 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 and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

Charles Baudelaire

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