Poetry Quotes

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Charles Simic

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

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

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 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

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

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

There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.

Robert Graves

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

Marty This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.

This Is Spinal Tap

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

M. C. Richards

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

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

Havelock Ellis

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

Jean Giraudoux

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

Virginia

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

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

Jean Cocteau

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

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

Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Beverly Nichols

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

Charles Baudelaire

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

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

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 is to hold judgment on your soul.

Henrik Ibsen, Norweigen Playwright

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

Christopher Fry

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

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

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

Lord Byron