Life Quotes

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Choose something you like to do. I know it's a cliche, and you've heard it over and over. But the reason is, you're going to have to work long and hard to achieve any success. You better like it or life is going to be terrible.

~ Bill Kurtis

Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.

~ Danny Glover

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

~ T. S. Eliot

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

~ Carol Ann Duffy

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.

~ William Rose Benet

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

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

~ Eavan Boland

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

~ Mary Oliver

Superstition is the poetry of life.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

~ William Hazlitt

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

~ Seamus Heaney

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

~ Paul Auster

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.

~ Felix Dennis

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

~ Mohsin Hamid

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!

~ Ellen Key

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

~ Erica Jong

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

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

~ Erica Jong

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

~ Edward Hirsch

You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.

~ Fred Durst

Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.

~ Claire Tomalin

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

~ Donald Hall

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

~ Donald Hall

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

~ Donald Hall

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

~ Lisa Marie Presley

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

~ Alice Mcdermott

Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.

~ Simon Schama

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

~ Simon Schama

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

~ Rita Dove

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

~ Natasha Trethewey

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

~ Vikram Seth

Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.

~ Vikram Seth

I lived a pretty chaotic life. I went to England, and I moved around, and there were a lot of things that I was interested in. I wrote poetry. I took photographs. I was a musician and all sorts of things. Nothing brilliant, but I did all these different things.

~ Pawel Pawlikowski