If you haven’t had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.
Phyllis Battelle
Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.
Timothy Leary
To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, 1825
Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold, “Self-Dependence,” Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, 1852
Every one of us has in him a continent of undiscovered character. Blessed is he who acts the Columbus to his own soul.
Author Unknown
There’s a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.
Pearl Bailey
He who knows others is learned; He who knows himself is wise.
Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching
Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
William Butler Yeats
No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
Thomas Mann
I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.
Mark Twain
Tag Archives: Poems
Motivating Quotes On Poems
If you got to talking to most cowboys, they’d admit they write ‘em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.
Ross Knox
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
W.H. Auden
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
Mathematics and Poetry are… the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart.
Thomas Hill
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
W. Somerset Maugham
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale ’til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
Rene Char
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939
Quotations about Poems
If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.
Derek Walcott
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer…. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E.B. White
The poet… may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal I’magination, 1950
If you’ve got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow.
Terri Guillemets
Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Rita Dove
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G.K. Chesterton
A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
Dennis Gaborf
Thoughts on Poems
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson
Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.
Carl Sandburg
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
Come voyeur my poems ~ Feel free, I feel free. ~
Carrie Latet
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats
Poetry is frosted fire.
J. Patrick Lewis
If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.
Derek Walcott
209 – Quotation by Fay Wray
I don’t know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn’t get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.
Quotes on Poems
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset, Le Poète déchu, 1839
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Paul Engle, New York Times, 17 February 1957
I don’t create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
Edith Södergran
There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower garden and of a perfumer’s shop.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Mr. Witwould: “Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies.” Mrs. Millamant: “Only with those in verse…. I never pin up my hair with prose.”
William Congreve, The Way of the World
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost, 1935
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
Robinson Jeffers
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The word “Verse” is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification… the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns.
J. Patrick Lewis
Inspiring Quotations on Poems
Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns.
J. Patrick Lewis
The poem… is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see – it is, rather, a light by which we may see – and what we see is life.
Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review, 22 March 1958
A poem should not mean But be.
Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926
Your prayer can be poetry, and poetry can be your prayer.
Terri Guillemets
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
W.H. Auden
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser, quoted in Highs by Alex J. Packer
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Pablo Neruda, quoted in Wall Street Journal,, 14 November 1985
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick…. You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps… so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto, 1961
Poets aren’t very useful Because they aren’t consume-ful or very produce-ful.
Ogden Nash
If you got to talking to most cowboys, they’d admit they write ‘em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.
Ross Knox
Inspiration for Poems
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appall them if it did.
Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe
The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.
Robert Frost
Like butterflies in Spring ~ Poetry awakens the Spirit, stirs the imagination and explores the possibilities with each stroke of its rhythmic wings.
Jamie Lynn Morris
Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.
Sigmund Freud, quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations by Alan L. Mackay, 1991
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Edgar Allan Poe
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
Robert Frost
If Painting be Poetry’s sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabers and white-plumed helmets.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson