Poetry Quotes
Poetry the best words in the best order.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
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
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.Adrian Mitchell
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest to reach true perfection.E. C. Stedman
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
We have more poets thatnjudges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem that to understand a good one.Michel de Montaigne
Wine is bottled poetry.Robert Louis Stevenson
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
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
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
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
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.Kahlil Gibran
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.Robert Frost
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.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
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.Christopher Fry
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 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
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic
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.
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.Simonides
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
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
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.Oscar Wilde
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.Jean Giraudoux
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.Robert Graves
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 the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.William Wordsworth
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.Virginia
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
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.Plato
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
Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.Henrik Ibsen, Norweigen Playwright
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)
