Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?

William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician.

With no companion but the constant Muse, Who sought me when I needed her ah, when Did I not need her, solitary else?

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet.

Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

You admire, Vacerra, only the poets of old and praise only those who are dead. Pardon me, I beseech you, Vacerra, if I think death too high a price to pay for your praise.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

You have a point," said Fronto, "and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic.

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

You have to put yourself to one side and get away from the 'Victorian poet' model where you are the universe. You have to do everything you can to take your ego out of the equation.

You must continue. Poets are the ones who change the world.

A gargoyle’s howl, like a poet’s, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city.

...a bard's down-to-earth love: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red and when she walks, treads on the ground...

A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.

A country that denies it, citizens, the opportunity to "civil liberties", better health care, schools, roads, electricity and water. Is a country on a brink of no return.

Aelia, please stop worrying. You look beautiful. We've had large parties before and you haven't been nervous." There was the clink of cosmetic pots and bottles of nard used to perfume the forehead. "I wasn't nervous until you mentioned Ovid would be coming," Aelia said. Aelia was not alone in her love of Ovid's poetry. Passia had read every word the man had ever written. He was considered to be one of Rome's experts on both love and beauty, and most women I knew owned several of his books. When Passia heard he would be in attendance I thought she might swoon. There was the ruffle of a scroll being unraveled. "Could this be one of the sources of your concern? Women's Facial Cosmetics?" I remembered the book. Apicius had bought it and other Ovid titles for Aelia two years earlier as a Saturnalia gift. "I know, I shouldn't worry. But if he didn't know so much, how could he write it down? It is as though he were the mouthpiece for Venus herself!

After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin. Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.

A great poet gives words wings to fly in the reader's perceptual sky.

Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.

a cracked yolk split between her thighs. she rushed to clean up her shame. yellow stained her hands; yellow stained her child, who was born in a world designed to hate. —the early nineties

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

A happy poet who writes about his window and the glass doors of his bookcases that reflect pensively a beloved, lonely vastness. This is the poet I would have liked to become (...)

Ah. That is the price of love, I'm afraid—the pain one suffers from its loss. I'm not convinced it's worth it. Perhaps if one must love, one should do so in moderation." "Moderation in love," she mused aloud. "It's not something that would inspire a poet, is it?" "A poet's view of the world would make for an uncomfortable life, wouldn't it? Everyone at the mercy of his or her passions, all of us tearing our hair out for the sake of love...

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

Aku selalu berhasil menulis semua keindahan yang ada, namun tidak dengan dirimu. Ujung penaku seakan tak mampu untuk menuliskan akhir dari sebuah cerita.

Aku selalu larut pada keindahanmu, tidak cukup bagiku hanya menguntai kata perihal dirimu, pesonamu bak gemintang yang memberi kesejukan, gemulaimu bak rembulan yang selalu bersinar tatkala gelap bermunculan.

A life lived outside of one's giftedness is a complete and utter travesty. It deprives the world of the beauty we each bring to our respective space(s). It leaves us all less fulfilled and enlightened.

A lie is still a lie even if it’s disguised as the truth.

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.

All I ask the haters--and I, too, am one--is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.

All kinds of people read poetry: revolutionaries, scholars, sentimentalists etc. But above all else, lovers read poetry. Why? Because we fell in love. And then we fell in love with love.

All I need to do is place my pen against paper and your love writes for me.

All of us,' he said, 'have hopes of being poet, artist, discoverer, philospoher, scientist; of possessing the attributes of all these simultaneously. Few are permitted to achieve any of them in daily life. But in travel we attain them all. Then we have our day of glory, when all our dreams come true, when we can be anything we like, as long as we like, and, when we are tired of it, pull up stakes and move on. Travel -- the solitude of the mountains, the emptiness of the desert, the delicacy of the minaret; eternal change, limitless contrast, unending variety.' (Eric Lang)

All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries.

All that really matters is to feel alive, if only for a single moment – to feel in Intense Sensation that our existence is not an endless repetition of sleeping, eating, drinking, and dressing.

Am I going to die and all I will have are these fucking poems

A man is his own mystery.

An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.' 'So it is,' said Mr. Syme. 'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox.