Poetry And Quotes

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.
- Aberjhani

A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.
- Aberjhani

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
- Robert Adamson

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin line there all round everything.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric?
- James Joyce

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.
- James Joyce

...wisely mingled poetry and prose.
- Louisa May Alcott

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.
- Nelson Algren

That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
- David Amram

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry.
I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.
- Louis Aragon

I realized Michael was right. I mean, I am always writing in this journal. And I do compose a lot of poetry, and write a lot of notes and emails and stuff. I mean, I feel like I am always writing. I do it so much, I never even thought about it as a talent. It's just something I do all the time, like breathing.
- Meg Cabot

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.
- Simon Armitage

The word 'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.
- Matthew Arnold

She ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.
- Jane Austen

I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
- Oscar Wilde

At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world
- Muriel Barbery

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
- Charles Baudelaire

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

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.
- Charles Baxter

In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.'.
- Eric Blehm

There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.
- Jorge Luis Borges

If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.
- John F Kennedy

I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.
- J Carter Brown

I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply
a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day
should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to
animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing
breezes cannot be bettered.
- Nicholas Sparks

And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.
- Nicholas Sparks

I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica.
- Stephen Chbosky

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

What I have lately said of painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art?
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The mind-blowing, ridiculous sex which was the stuff of both poetry and porn - so unlike anything else I had ever experienced before.
- Emily Giffin

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
- Lord Byron

The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers -- distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings.
- Peter Cameron

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
- Lucille Clifton

don't write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.
- Lucille Clifton

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.
- Bruce Cockburn

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
- Judy Collins

In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.
- Cameron Conaway

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
- Pat Conroy

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, This is and no mistake.
- Henry David Thoreau

The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.
- Henry David Thoreau

May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!
- Mahmoud Darwish

I go in and slip a note in Jane's locker, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English taught me from. I said I wouldn't be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I'm not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.
- John Green

I said I wouldn't be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I'm not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.
- John Green

The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.
- Annie Dillard

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
- John Drinkwater

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
- John Drinkwater

Poetry and prayer are very similar.
- Carol Ann Duffy

She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.
- Carol Ann Duffy

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
- Umberto Eco

Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group.
- George Orwell

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
- George Eliot

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
- Emilio Estevez

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.
- Ian Hamilton Finlay

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
- Shelby Foote

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
- John Fowles

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
- Viktor E Frankl

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
- Zona Gale

Knowledge is what man is all about. People like you have tried to hold back progress since the beginning of time. But they failed, and you failed. Man needs to know."
"Maybe," Sanders said. "But is that the only thing man needs? I don't think so. I think he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance. I think he needs a few unanswered questions, to make him brood and wonder.
- George R R Martin

It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
- William H Gass

I really would like to stop working forevernever work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing nowand do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone maybe even a man and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.
- Allen Ginsberg

Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.
- Nikki Giovanni

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
- Vincent Van Gogh

I want Poetry and Power and the young men who create it - Eleanor of Aquitaine in Lion in Winter
- James Goldman

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
- Witold Gombrowicz

Why can't fellows be allowed to do what they like when they like and as they like, instead of other fellows sitting on banks and watching them all the time and making remarks and poetry and things about them?
- Kenneth Grahame

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
- Sylvia Plath

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
- Franz Grillparzer

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
- Marilyn Hacker

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
- Knut Hamsun

It's possible to understand the world from studying a leaf. You can comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, mathematics, poetry and biology through the complex beauty of such a perfect structure.
It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing.
- Joy Harjo

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.
- P J Harvey

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
- Ryszard Kapuscinski

I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
- J Milton Hayes

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
- Seamus Heaney

But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.
- Lafcadio Hearn

None but a poet can understand a poet; none but a romantic spirit transported with poetry and consecrated in the Holy of Holies an comprehend what the ordained utters out of his inspiration.
- E T A Hoffmann

Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
- Nick Hornby

I spent the rest of that day brainstorming. How do you catch a very old, very alert tiger by surprise? Use his weaknesses: food, feminine wiles, poetry, and over-protectiveness. The poor guy didn't stand a chance.
- Colleen Houck

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.
- Robert Green Ingersoll

I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.
- Louise Jameson

Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.
- Jayz

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'
- Jewel

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
- Erica Jong

Somewhere between poetry and science, somewhere between heaven and earth, clairaudience is born. Clairaudience is the sweetest mystery any human being could ever experience. Fortunately, it is the most contagious, too. Most, if not all, of my students walk away with some level of clairaudience after spending three hours in one of my workshops.
- Amelia Kinkade

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
- Naomi Klein

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
- Kenneth Koch

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
- Philip Levine

Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The 'beauties' which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either dislike or simply do not notice.
This change of taste makes an invisible wall between us and them.
- C S Lewis

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
- Henry R Luce

The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time -- music and poetry -- and not the arts of space -- sculpture and painting.
- Salvador De Madariaga

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.
- Ray Manzarek

I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.
- Callan Mcauliffe

Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
- John H Mcwhorter

But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.
- A A Milne

Oh, why was he so handsomely blond, so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all - and yet so desirable?
- Margaret Mitchell

I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.
- Kathleen Norris

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
- Thomas Moore

Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul," he told them. "So we will start with these studies.
- Greg Mortenson

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
- John Muir

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

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
- Richard M Nixon

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
- Wilfred Owen

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
- Camille Paglia

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.
- Fernando Pessoa

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a bookkeeper forever, and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty. In the future I'll be living quietly in a little house somewhere, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will use different excuses to the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself.
- Fernando Pessoa

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
- Steven Pinker

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
- Plutarch

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
- Dennis Potter

Wasn't it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was?
- Anne Rice

Our parents prayer is the most beautiful poetry and expectations
- Aditia Rinaldi

We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.
- Muriel Rukeyser

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.
- David Sedaris

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
- William Shenstone

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)
- Patti Smith

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
- Stephen Sondheim

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
- Wallace Stevens

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
- Anne Stevenson

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
- Cheryl Strayed

I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.
- Taylor Swift

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

I do actually dabble in a bit of poetry! And I'm yet to pen a script, but it is something that I've been telling myself I want to do.
- Luke Treadaway

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.
- Miguel De Unamuno

Desmonde
looked over to where Delilah had gone, his gaze focused on
it. He smiled wryly and said softly, You'd be surprised to know that I am a man whose heart could be stolen by a woman who loved beauty in darker things. A woman who loved chaos and disorder. A woman who loved poetry, and beautiful sonatas.
- Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.
- Diane Wakoski

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
- Diane Wakoski

She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.
- Edith Wharton

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
- Edith Wharton

Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
- Patrick White

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it's probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it's like to be that lobster in the pot, that's in poetry too.
- Dean Young