Poetry Quotes

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

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

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

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 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.

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

Havelock Ellis

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

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

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest to reach true perfection.

E. C. Stedman

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

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

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Robert Frost

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

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

Wine is bottled poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

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

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo

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

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert Frost

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

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

Kahlil Gibran

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

R. Z. Sheppard, book critic

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

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley