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Poetry quotes

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“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” - 1845

“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” - 2010

“Happiness is the poetry of woman, as the toilette is her tinsel.” Honoré de Balzac, “Father Goriot” - 1835

“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” - 1929

“Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.” Jay-Z, “Decoded” - 2010

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact” William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night's Dream” - 1601

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” - 1890

“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.” George Eliot, “Middlemarch” - 1872

“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” - 1908

“Poets act shamelessly towards their experiences: they exploit them.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil” - 1886

“Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Aristotle, “Poetics” - c. 335 BC

“He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here.” William Shakespeare, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” - 1602

“Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.” G. K. Chesterton, “What's Wrong with the World” - 1910

“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” - 1891

“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.” Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence” - 1920

“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” - 1597

“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” - 1858

“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” - 1840

“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” - 1912

“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” - 1874

“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” - 1916

“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” - 1944

“Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.” Tennessee Williams, “The Glass Menagerie” - 1944

“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” - 1984

“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” - 1818

“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” - 1890

“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” - 1891

“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love” Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice” - 28 January 1813

“if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?” Neil Gaiman, “The Graveyard Book” - 2008

“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” - 1872

Related topics

life love art music philosophy woman imagination writing logic history creation wisdom food marriage truth knowledge happiness romance words reality

Related authors

Oscar Wilde (3)
William Shakespeare (2)
G. K. Chesterton (2)
George Eliot (2)
Tennessee Williams (2)
Jay-Z (2)
Jane Austen (1)
Edgar Allan Poe (1)
James Joyce (1)
Aristotle (1)
Thomas Hardy (1)
Edith Wharton (1)
Francis Bacon (1)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1)
Honoré de Balzac (1)
Alexis de Tocqueville (1)
Samuel Butler (1)
Anthony Trollope (1)
Rabindranath Tagore (1)

Related sources

The Picture of Dorian Gray (2)
Middlemarch (2)
The Glass Menagerie (2)
Decoded (2)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1)
Pride and Prejudice (1)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1)
The Raven (1)
The Merry Wives of Windsor (1)
What's Wrong with the World (1)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1)
The Age of Innocence (1)
The Essays of Francis Bacon (1)
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1)
Democracy in America (1)
Father Goriot (1)
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1)
Phineas Redux (1)
The Home and the World (1)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1)