Popular quotes about Poets! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
The poets are wrong of course [โฆ] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
William FaulknerThere's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.
David BiespielThe works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.
Henry David ThoreauMetaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.
James GearyI'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.
Diane WakoskiYou don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob DylanI beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
George EliotLove has been taken away from the poets, and has been brought within the domain of true science. It may prove to be one of the great cosmic elementary forces. When the atom of hydrogen draws the atom of chlorine towards it to form the perfected molecule of hydrochloric acid, the force which it exerts may be intrinsically similar to that which draws me to you. Attraction and repulsion appear to be the primary forces. This is attraction.
Arthur Conan DoyleEveryone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.
Andre Naffis-SahelyI defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
Charles OlsonSan Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
Gavin NewsomAh, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!
Friedrich NietzscheMusicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.
Abraham MaslowWe are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women canโt read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden
Catherine FisherIf we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage.
Del CloseA quote that I like very much comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs. โChinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.โ
Stephen ShoreI once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.
Eavan BolandAnd some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Norman MacCaigPoets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyKabul was a thriving cosmopolitan city with its vibrant artistic, intellectual and cultural life. There were poets, musicians, and writers. There was also an influx of western culture, art, and literature in the '60s and '70s.
Khaled HosseiniRash combat oft immortalizes man; if he should fall, he is renowned in song; but after-ages reckon not the ceaseless tears which the forsaken woman sheds. Poets tell us not of the many nights consumed in weeping, or of the dreary days wherein her anguished soul vainly yearns to call her loved one back.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheThere are still many writers out in the Bay, extraordinary writers like Gina Valdez, a poet who I just saw in Portland. We have young people like Eduardo Corral, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award. Josรฉ Antonio Rodriguez, published by Luis Rodriguez. But there are only a few of us who are paid attention to in New York. There are legions behind us who are not.
Sandra CisnerosIt is the gift of all poets to find the commonplace astonishing, and the astonishing quite natural.
Margery SharpDont teach my boy poetry, an English mother recently wrote the Provost of Harrow. Dont teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament. Well, perhaps she was rightbut if more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live on this Commencement Day of 1956.
John F. KennedyI treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think thatโs accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.
Dan ChiassonThe poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
Sigmund FreudWe must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.
William H. GassBy 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 KemptonHas anyone...any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? ... There is an ecstasy such that the immese strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one's steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes... Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity.
Friedrich NietzscheI'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.
PJ HarveyI wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
Tom VerlaineWhen some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race-a crocodile, a dandelion, a stony valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint-there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in it and befriend it. They are poets, scientists and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups can be found.
Mary MidgleyIt is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.
Johan HuizingaThe poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.
PlatoI took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
Carl SandburgI want people to see the beauty of that condition through the eyes of the characters. In doing that, they can allow people who have the condition to be more accepting of it, and to be open about it. That would be a contribution to the people who have it, and considering that 38% of the Pulitzer Prize winning poets are Bipolar, to think about how much these individuals have contributed to the human spirit.
Paul Dalio