19th-century Poet Quotes

Alexander Pushkin

Emily Dickinson

Rainer Maria Rilke

Kahlil Gibran

Robert Frost

Ivan Turgenev

Charles Baudelaire

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Lady Margaret Sackville

Summary riposte
To the dreary wail
There's no knowing what
Love is all about.
Poets know a lot.

What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.

Antonio Porchia

She moves the way clocks move. And on her face, as on a clock dial which someone shines a light onto at night, a strange, briefly shown hour stands: a terrifying hour, in which someone dies.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I tasted - careless - then -
I did not know the Wine
Came once a World - Did you?
Oh, had you told me so -
This Thirst would blister - easier - now

Emily Dickinson

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way

Isaac Rosenberg

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

Alexander Pushkin

Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure?

Beautiful... as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Comte de Lautréamont

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.

The white man had come with the Bible in one hand, the bottle in the other.

E. Pauline Johnson

Like to a stone
That rolls down a hill,
I have come to this day.

Takuboku Ishikawa

Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns Its fragrant lamps, and turns Into a royal court with green festoons The banks of dark lagoons.

On the beryl-rimmed rebecs of Ruby
Brought fresh from the hyaline streams,
She played on the banks of the Yuba
Such songs as she heard in her dreams.

Thomas Holley Chivers

We like to give in the sunlight, and to receive in the dark.

Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with all the means at his disposal.

Your tiny hand is frozen, let me warm it in mine.

Giuseppe Giacosa

It whispers; all is waiting here
Kept safe for thee, year after year,
Beautiful songs in thousands;
Where hast thou been, where, where?

Erik Axel Karlfeldt

Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it.

Velimir Khlebnikov

As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

It is not, in fact, cookery books that we need half so much as cooks really trained to a knowledge of their duties.

I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach; But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech. Hold to thine ear And plain thou'lt hear Tales of ships.

Charles Henry Webb

O wild, dark flower of woman, Deep rose of my desire, An Eastern wizard made you Of earth and stars and fire.

Charles G. D. Roberts

Ah, the whites! Their malignity and their omniscience—that was what made them terrifying!

Ay, this is the famed rock, which Hercules
And Goth and Moor bequeathed us. At this door
England stands sentry.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt