Poetry Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand."

G. K. Chesterton

Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Oh! That was poetry!" said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?

J. R. R. Tolkien

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

G. K. Chesterton

The Poet Language is the archives of history... Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

For we do not listen with the best regard to the verses of a man who is only a poet, nor to his problems if he is only an algebraist; but if a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundations of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.

Ralph Waldo Emerson