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poetry quotes

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“She's brim full of poetry—actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She LIVES what paper-poets only write...” Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
“Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Aristotle, Poetics
“Happiness is the poetry of woman, as the toilette is her tinsel.” Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot
“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Grunts and nods don't add up to poetry. But maybe writing poetry brings out some hidden talent in the guy. ” Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“You see, poetry resembles metaphysics, one does not mind one's own, but one does not like any one else's.” Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
“I've always said, poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness; all that mush!” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it.” Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
“A poet’s mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest white light of truth.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
“Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.” Dan Simmons, Hyperion
“Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.” Francis Bacon, The Essays of Francis Bacon
“Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.” Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
“Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World
“the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.” Aristotle, Poetics
“‘What is your conception of beauty?’ I said I thought it was an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels – an expression of it can be a dustbin...” Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography
“It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.” Aristotle, Poetics
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.” Oscar Wilde, Intentions
“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.” Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle
“He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.” James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Poets act shamelessly towards their experiences: they exploit them.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact” William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
“The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.” Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes...” George Eliot, Middlemarch
“I really did think at one time that I was on the verge of becoming a poet, but Providence was kind enough to save me from that disaster.” Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
“Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
“People go on quarrelling and fancying this and that, and thinking that the world is full of romance and poetry. When they get married they know better.” Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux
“I also became a poet and for one year lived in a paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“It is merely because a stepping-stone, here and there, is heedlessly left unsupplied in our road to the Differential Calculus, that this latter is not altogether as simple a thing as a sonnet by Mr. Solomon Seesaw.” Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka
“if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?” Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
“I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here.” William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

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life art love music truth writing reality books words woman imagination philosophy history logic creation light business feeling hip-hop happiness

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Oscar Wilde (3)
Aristotle (3)
JAY-Z (2)
Edgar Allan Poe (2)
William Shakespeare (2)
George Eliot (2)
G. K. Chesterton (2)
Tennessee Williams (2)
Dan Simmons (1)
Virginia Woolf (1)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1)
Jane Austen (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1)
Haruki Murakami (1)
James Joyce (1)
Henry David Thoreau (1)
Neil Gaiman (1)
Francis Bacon (1)
Ray Bradbury (1)
Milan Kundera (1)

Related sources

Poetics (3)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (2)
Middlemarch (2)
Decoded (2)
The Glass Menagerie (2)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1)
The Essays of Francis Bacon (1)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1)
Pride and Prejudice (1)
Intentions (1)
Fahrenheit 451 (1)
Frankenstein (1)
Beyond Good and Evil (1)
Kafka on the Shore (1)
My Autobiography (1)
The Age of Innocence (1)
Letters to a Young Poet (1)
Democracy in America (1)
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1)
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1)