poetry
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘poetry’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.” -George William Curtis
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“The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.” -Erik Satie
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“I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.” -Joni Mitchell
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“I’ve written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.” -J. Michael Straczynski
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“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.” -W. H. Auden
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“I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he’s written poetry then let the verdict be that he’s a poet.” -Leonard Cohen
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“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” -Thomas Hardy
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“I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.” -John Cage
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“Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.” -Denis Diderot
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“Well you can’t teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.” -David Hockney
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“I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important.” -John F. Kerry
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“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
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“Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don’t have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there’s poetry written right on the bathroom wall.” -Ani DiFranco
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“Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.” -Herbert Spencer
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“I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.” -Annie Lennox
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“Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.” -Vladimir Nabokov
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“France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.” -Charles Baudelaire
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“If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.” -Naguib Mahfouz
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“There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.” -Jean de la Bruyere
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“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” -Percy Bysshe Shelley
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“All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.” -Gustave Flaubert
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“Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.” -Jean Cocteau
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“Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.” -J. K. Rowling
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“As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you’re always ultimately going to be saying somebody else’s words. I don’t think I’d have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I’d love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.” -Daniel Radcliffe
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“Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.” -Havelock Ellis
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“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
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“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.” -James Joyce
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“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.” -John Updike
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“Poetry is not only dream and vision it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” -Audre Lorde
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“But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.” -Chinua…
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“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.” -Gertrude Stein
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“Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.” -Carl Sandburg
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“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.” -William Hazlitt
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“The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.” -E. M. Forster
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“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.” -John Keats
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“You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.” -Joseph Joubert
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“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.” -Virginia Woolf
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“Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don’t by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.” -Robert W. Service
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“Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.” -Andres Segovia
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“Teach you children poetry it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.” -Walter Scott
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“The crown of literature is poetry.” -W. Somerset Maugham
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“For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.” -Pablo Neruda
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“The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.” -Sylvia Plath
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“I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.” -John Donne
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“At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.” -Satyajit Ray
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“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.” -John Ruskin
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“There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.” -Emily Dickinson
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“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.” -Vincent Van Gogh
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“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.” -Edmund Burke
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“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” -William Butler Yeats
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“A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.” -Lord Byron
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“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.” -Maria Montessori
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“It’s bad poetry executed by people that can’t sing. That’s my definition of Rap.” -Peter Steele
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“The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.” -John Muir
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“Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men’s souls.” -James Russell Lowell
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“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.” -T. S. Eliot
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“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.” -Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“Superstition is the poetry of life.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.” -H. L. Mencken
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“Love is the poetry of the senses.” -Honore de Balzac
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“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
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“Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
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“Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.” -Victor Hugo
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“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” -William Wordsworth
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“Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.” -William Blake
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“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.” -Niels Bohr
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“Why should poetry have to make sense?” -Charlie Chaplin
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“Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.” -Robert Frost
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“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.” -Edgar Allan Poe
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“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” -John F. Kennedy
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“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” -Jim Morrison
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“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
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“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” -Aristotle
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“I’m sorry, man, but I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time – and this includes naps – I’m an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.” -Charlie Sheen
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“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.” -Henry David Thoreau
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“Wine is bottled poetry.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
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“The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn’t mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.” -Johnny Depp
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“Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.” -Eli Khamarov
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“You don’t make a poem with ideas, but with words.” -Stephane Mallarme
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“We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.” -John Fowles
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“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” -Charles Simic
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“The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.” -Richard Rosen
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“Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.” -Dennis Gabor
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“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” -Albert Einstein
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“A poem can have an impact, but you can’t expect an audience to understand all the nuances.” -Douglas Dunn
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“Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.” -Alfred de Musset
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“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.” -Octavio Paz
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“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” -Thomas Gray
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“If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.” -M. H. Abrams
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“The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.” -Lionel Trilling
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“The novel is born of disillusionment the poem, of despair.” -Jose Bergamin
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“‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.” -Andre Gide
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“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.” -George Sand
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“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.” -David Carradine
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“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.” -Paul Engle
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“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” -Plutarch
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“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” -Salman Rushdie
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“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.” -Walt Whitman
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“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” -Samuel Johnson
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“No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.” -Horace
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“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.” -Oscar Wilde
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“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” -Khalil Gibran
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“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.” -Steven Wright
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“One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.” -Voltaire
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