Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about

What was said by the Latin poet of labor--that it conquers all things--is much more true when applied to impudence.

When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

When the poet died his cat was put to death and mummified.

When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away.

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.

When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

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

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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 (...)

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

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

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