Quotes by Poets - Page 24

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T.S Eliot
The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
T.S Eliot
Poetry is a mug's game.
T.S Eliot
Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.
William Ellery Channing
When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
A drainless shower of light is poesy 'tis the supreme of power 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.
John Keats
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
Dylan Thomas
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.
Earle Birney
I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme From that time unto this season I received nor rhyme nor reason.
Edmund Spenser
Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.
Mikhail Dudan
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.
Stéphane Mallarmé
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
T.S Eliot
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Hartley Coleridge
All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them but what is universal.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The man is either mad or he is making verses.
Horace
Let your poem be kept nine years.
Horace
I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
With me poetry has not been a purpose but a passion.
Edgar Allan Poe
Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme.
John Fletcher
Poetry the eldest sister of all arts and parent of most.
William Congreve
There is no pleasure without a tincture of bitterness.
Hafiz
They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.
Henry Burton
We tire of those pleasures we take but never of those we give.
J. Petit-Senn
Follow pleasure and then will pleasure flee Flee pleasure and pleasure will follow thee.
John Heywood
For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.
William Shakespeare
There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare
There was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.
William Shakespeare
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings Conquer all mysteries by rule and line Empty the haunted air the gnomed mine -Unweave a rainbow.
John Keats
A man of business may talk of philosophy a man who has none may practise it.
Alexander Pope
Adversity's sweet milk philosophy.
William Shakespeare
Philosophy - the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree.
T.S Eliot
Philosophy is a good horse in the stable but an errant jade on a journey.
Oliver Goldsmith
Where's the man could ease the heart Like a satin gown?
Dorothy Parker
But Shelley had a hyperthyroid face.
John C. Squire
(Abraham Lincoln's) weathered face was homely as a plowed field.
Stephen Vincent Benét
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold
There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men but austere perseverance harsh and continuous may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.
Johann von Goethe
In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm in the real world all rests on perseverance.
Johann von Goethe
For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until by and by out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see. Thinks what ne'er was nor is nor e'er shall be.
Alexander Pope
The very pink of perfection.
Oliver Goldsmith
Trifles make perfection and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo
Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world.
Robert Hillyer
What after all is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.
Christopher Fry
A perfect poem is impossible. Once it has been written the world would end.
Robert Graves
Perfection does not exist. To understand this is the triumph of human intelligence to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.
Alfred de Musset
The two kinds of people on earth that I mean Are the people who lift and the people who lean.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
Marge Piercy
Peace hath her victories No less renowned than war.
John Milton
The war-drum throbb'd no longer and the battleflags were furl'd In the parliament of man the federation of the world.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Peace at any price.
Alphonse de Lamartine