Life Quotes

Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.

~ David Whyte

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

~ David Whyte

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

~ David Whyte

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

~ Ben Okri

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

~ Ben Okri

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

~ Andrew Motion

I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too.

~ Judith Viorst

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

~ Louis Macneice

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

~ Wallace Stevens

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

~ Saul Williams

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

~ Walter Pater

I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.

~ Eavan Boland

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

~ Mark Strand

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

~ Charles Olson

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

~ Robert Penn Warren

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

~ Robert Penn Warren

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

~ John Ashbery

The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.

~ Felix Adler

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

~ Henry David Thoreau

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

~ Tom Wolfe

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

~ H. P. Lovecraft

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

~ Albert Schweitzer

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I've come to accept that the life of a frontrunner is a hard one, that he will suffer more injuries than most men and that many of these injuries will not be accidental.

~ Pelé

I don't think feminism, as I understand the definition, implies the rejection of maternal values, nurturing children, caring about the men in your life. That is just nonsense to me.

~ Hillary Clinton

The men who abandon themselves to the passions of this miserable life, are compared in Scripture to beasts.

~ Peter Abelard

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

~ Charles Caleb Colton

Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.

~ Fred Allen

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

~ Clifton Fadiman

President Obama and members of his administration constantly express rage and anger over events totally within their control. It's an odd and unsettling fact of American life that so many Americans seem to think that such expressions of frustration should substitute for actual competence.

~ Ben Shapiro

Anger is an unnecessary emotion. Loads of stuff in life can trigger it, but what matters is how you react. I choose not to react.

~ Nicola Adams

When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life. So I bit my tongue. I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

~ Alanis Morissette

Although you may spend your life killing, You will not exhaust all your foes. But if you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain.

~ Nāgārjuna

Life is precious and there's not a lot of room for anger.

~ Fran Drescher

Being irrational and out of control is what happens in real life. Not cautiously choreographing your anger or your emotions, losing yourself in them is what happens in real life.

~ Margot Robbie

Maybe it's stress or anger or adrenaline or disillusionment or a bullying nature or simple fear of getting killed themselves, but there is a problem if a cop cannot tell the difference between a menacing gangster and the far more common person they encounter whose life is a little frayed and messy.

~ David Horsey

Christ hath instituted Baptism as a bath, to wash away the anger, and hath put into us the Noble Stone, viz. the water of eternal life, for an earnest-penny, so that instantly in our childhood we might be able to escape the wrath.

~ Jakob Böhme

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

~ Jack Henry Abbott