Poetry Quotes

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

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

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

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

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

Thomas Carlyle

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

Kahlil Gibran

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

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

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.

Edward Hubbell Chaplin

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

R. Z. Sheppard, book critic

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

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

Beverly Nichols

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.

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 a way of taking life by the throat.

Robert Frost

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

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.

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

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 the language in which man explores his own amazement.

Christopher Fry

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

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

Jean Giraudoux

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