Poet Quotes

Goethe

The man is either mad or he is making verses.

Horace

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

Every man is a poet when he is in love.

Plato

Poets have a license to lie.

Pliny the Younger

Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.

Hartley Coleridge

All men are poets at heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern poets mix too much water with their ink.

Goethe

The man is either mad or he is making verses.

Horace

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

Every man is a poet when he is in love.

Plato

Poets have a license to lie.

Pliny the Younger

Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

Emil M. Cioran

Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself.

Raegan Butcher

That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.

George MacDonald

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.

Anne Carson

...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...

John Geddes

One does not become a poet by uttering beautiful words. One becomes a poet by pouring their soul as wine into the Cup of Love.

Subhan Zein

...you called me poet-priest - I am. ...devoted to my art, faithful to you...or, is the other way around?...

John Geddes

...what else would a poet priest do on an endless night, but write of love?...

John Geddes

He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Nations conquered and true love prevails, all encompassed in a poets tale.

R.J. Craddock

Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit.These are the things all the great philosophersjust won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathingAnd you keep writing-creating because that’s what you doAnd that’s who you are. There are no magical voices to guideYou except your own. Make it count.~ R.M. ENGELHARDT

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

...I guess you're right - I am a priest - I offer sacrifices - so take this line, I want you to have something of mine...

John Geddes

A poet in his senses knocks vainly at the gates of poetry.

Ben Johnson

Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

I have wished you something None of the others would....

Philip Larkin

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

Arthur Rimbaud

For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?

Matthew Arnold

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet.

Virginia Woolf

One's-Self I Sing One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.

Walt Whitman

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

Gustave Flaubert

Legend has it that while drinking wine in a boat on the river, [8th century Chinese poet Li Po] tried to grab the moon's reflection on the surface and tumbled in, which is probably the poet's equivalent of dying bravely in battle.

Matthew White

...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...Page 100.

Jack Kerouac

And while he compared all these things which he was seeing with his eyes to the mental pictures he had painted of them in his homesickness, it became clear to him that he was, after all, destined to be a poet, and he saw that in poets' dreams reside a beauty and enchantment that one seeks in vain in the things of the real world.

Hermann Hesse

I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.

Vladimir Nabokov

I am the poet with scaring words and blurred letters. I do not know if my poetry is a blessing or a curse.

Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

The ground will never complain how much weight you add on it, how much you dig it and how much you grow on it, How long you live on it. Unused ground is an abomination to nature.

Yando Wanii Nimbo

The Best Thing I love about being a writer and a poet is, I can make up my own words to fit my imagination.

Ocean Crisstopher Poet

Today is half of Yesterday and Tomorrow, Choose Today to make Tomorrow

Yando Wanii Nimbo

Only faith and restraint against the tyrant damns the saint.

Neil Gevisser

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

Gary Snyder

At one time I was weary of verse writing, and wanted to give it up. At another time I was determined to be a poet until I could establish a proud name over others. The alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless.

Bashō Matsuo

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know.

William S Burroughs

What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.

Peter Sloterdijk

That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day's left dawn for morning.

H.D.

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.

Peter Sloterdijk

A poet is a pillar of light in the darkness. Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.

Jasper Sole

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet:'You Walt Whitman-ing, Edna St. Vincent Millay! Go Emily Dickinson your mom!''Thanks for the advice, you pathetic piece of E.E. Cummings, but I think I'm gonna pass.''You Robert Frost-ing Nikki Giovanni! Get a life, nerd. You're a virgin.''Hey bro, you need to go outside and get some fresh air into you. Or a girlfriend.'I need to get a girlfriend into me? I think that shows a fundamental lack of comprehension about how babies are made.

John Green

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

Guy Davenport

I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.

Kenneth Koch

I prefer people to consider me by who I am and what I do and not by how I look!

Gayathri Jayakumar

If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Question not, but live and labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help from none;Life is mostly froth and bubble,Two things stand like stone,Kindness in another's trouble,Courage in your own.

Adam Lindsay Gordon

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

Gabriel García Márquez

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Poet Quotes

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