Poetry Quotes

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I realized that it was not by wisdom that poets write their poetry, but by a kind of nature or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets; for these also say many beautiful things, but do not know anything of what they say.

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

G. K. Chesterton

And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.

I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo — that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture — great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast — for luncheon — for dinner — for tea — for supper — for between meals. I like a change, occasionally.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

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I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut—anyway, just over the river in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose—or poetry in other words.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Henry David Thoreau

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice,
And wake from ignorance the Western World.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.

Let a man be stimulated by poetry, established by the rules of propriety, and perfected by music.

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,--a narrow belt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

Simone de Beauvoir

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chess has this in common with making poetry; that the desire for it comes upon the amateur in gusts.

The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.

Albert Einstein

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Raymond Chandler