Poets Quotes

There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...

~ Roger Cardinal

His answer was - not the common gallantries which come so easily to the lips of me - but simply that he loved me - he met argument with fact. He told me - that with himself also, the early freshness of youth had gone by, & that throughout it he had not been able to love any woman - that he loved now for the first time & the last.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.

~ Marty Rubin

There are anonymous poems and poets without poems.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?

~ Cecil Day-Lewis

I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.

~ Jenim Dibie

Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We're not entirely sure there ever were. They've found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France, some yet undetermined thing which might be the legendary inward eye. But all evidence, such as it is, suggests that, if there ever were poets, they were all burned into extinction during the interglacial period of despair.

~ Paddy Chayefsky

Poetry was not meant to be a workhorse; it was not designed to paint pretty moral pictures of life; it was not brought into being to confuse us with cryptograms, or high platitudes, or pompous pretensions. The poet was meant to be a seer; he was designed to run toward the intensities and magnificences of life, to bathe his hands in reality. But where the mystic ran toward Reality in silence and lost himself in it, the poet as soon as he had experienced it, ran back toward humanity crying the good news and putting it into shimmering webs of words.

~ Francis Beauchesne Thornton

[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)

~ Pierre Reverdy

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

~ Mark Rothko

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law, I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.

~ G.k. Chesterton

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

~ Murray Kempton

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.

~ Roman Payne

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

~ Kate Dicamillo

There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.

~ Thomas Macdonagh

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

~ Sara Sheridan

I learn life from the poets.

~ Germaine De Staël

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

~ Peter Kreeft

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

~ Marianne Moore

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Irish improves a poet.

~ Sina Queyras

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.

~ Jasper Sole

That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.

~ George Macdonald

the gods are created by poets --Ovid

~ Ovid

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

~ Salman Rushdie

Folks say I've never been quite right since - but they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so rare in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry.

~ L.m. Montgomery

To love is a natural instinct. To be loved is “something”. To be loved like crazy, like their life depends on you is a once-in-a-lifetime feeling. How many of us can keep their right hand on their heart and say that they have actually experienced something like that? Not many, I guess. Because you know what, once-in-a-lifetime moments, well, come once in a lifetime. You either have to extremely, enormously and tremendously lucky or have to manage to fascinate a poet or a painter or someone really very naïve or mentally unsound.

~ Daya Kudari

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

~ Francis Bacon

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

~ Dudley Moore

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

~ Christopher Morley

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

~ George Eliot

Children picking up our bonesWill never know that these were onceAs quick as foxes on the hill

~ Wallace Stevens

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

~ Samuel Beckett

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers