Poetry Quotes

What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it.

~ Alain De Botton

I am bothered by poems I don't understand.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.

~ Jane Hirshfield

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Ha! spring arrived on her sweet scented palanquin,carried by the spirited Zephyrus and his coir with their murmuring music undulated in its own softness and fondled the leaves to astir.

~ Nithin Purple

A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture.

~ Anonymous

Take a newspaper.Take some scissors.Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.Cut out the article.Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.Shake gently.Next take out each cutting one after the other.Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.The poem will resemble you.And there you are -- an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

~ Tristan Tzara

There is no revelation in my words. I am merely stating what others have forgotten to write down.

~ Kamand Kojouri

How lucky I am to lose sleep over such a work of art.

~ Taylor Patton

Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.

~ Virginia Heffernan

To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles; in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him.

~ C.s. Lewis

These poems are cupsthat I pour my life into.Here, Drink!

~ Kamand Kojouri

You'll live through my words and my pictures, and I'll live somewhere the skies are blue.

~ Maria Elena

that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Because at nightwhen others are sleeping, I drown myself in poetry.

~ Kamand Kojouri

A chord that becomes a melodious delusion,In polar discrepancy from blue to yellow painted,In yellow I existed, with digoxin’s deadly illusion,Like Van Gogh’s stars in a bright night untainted.

~ Selina A. Mahmood

The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

~ Oscar Wilde

If God could transcribe my heart, it'd still read I love you.

~ Jenim Dibie

Some thoughts you underestimate but may be capable of energizing the world. Never delay to put your thoughts into words.

~ Bikash Bhandari

And someday,when the partiesdon’t dazzle you anymore,and when the alcohol failsto amuse your senses,come to me.We’ll lie on the grass,stare at the stars,and talk about Life.Maybe I will become the Momentyou rediscover yourself again.

~ Meraaqi

In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry-- in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.

~ Dodie Smith

We are all of lifewho stepped from the seatrading weightless journeys of the currentsWe are all of lifewho build and tear down and build againto find gold and silverto find scars that weep and bleedto step from the seato stay with the sea

~ Tamara Rendell

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.

~ Guy De Maupassant

The spoken word is ephemeral. The written word, eternal. A symphony, timeless.

~ A.e. Samaan

LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the revolution actually comes about.

~ A.e. Samaan

The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time.

~ Ali Smith

Many years before, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to feel to the margins; it was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her.

~ Jenim Dibie

The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.

~ Criss Jami

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.

~ Marilynne Robinson

I love the pleasure of reading poetry.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.

~ Nikita Gill

Sit here, so I may writeyou into a poem and make you eternal.

~ Kamand Kojouri

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Is the healing process the writing or the reading of that writing?What are we all healing from? Ourselves?What are we all healing towards? Ourselves?

~ Michal Coret

We were not meant to read stories anymore. We were too busy writing our own.

~ Maria Elena

To read a poemIs to see light where there is darknessIs to hear silence where there is noiseIs to dance where there is no musicIs to sing where the only instrument is wordsAnd the stirring, impassioned pauses

~ A.a. Patawaran

I can't remember the poemThat pierced through my heartIt was the saddest I heardOf all truths ever spokenIt left a scar in meA wound that doesn't healBut the words are forgottenSo is a big part of me

~ A.a. Patawaran

I read for pleasureIn search of fictional worldsTo enrich my truths

~ A.a. Patawaran