Quotes About Poetry

79 quotes

According to Leonardo da Vinci, painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting. Charles Dickens said that poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage. Sigmund Freud said that every man is a poet at heart. John F. Kennedy said that when power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations, and when power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. Albert Einstein said that in scientific thinking there are always elements of poetry. Rosa Luxemburg, the writer, wrote that being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.
English playwright and poet

Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is!

— Romeo and Juliet

American philosopher

Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

— The Tao of Emerson the Tao of Emerson

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

— Reviews

British writer and journalist

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

— Keep the Aspidistra Flying

English writer and philologist

The world was fair, the mountains tall / In Elder Days before the fall...

— The Fellowship of the Ring

Lebanese-American writer, poet, and painter

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

— The Prophet

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

Here in this endless and gleaming wildernessI was removed farther than ever from the world of men --And I never saw so close and so clearly / The image in the mirror of my own soul.

— Poems

4th-century BCE Greek philosopher

The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.

— Ion

Iranian poet

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

— The Essential Rumi

US-British poet

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

— Four Quartets

American deafblind author, political activist, lecturer, scholar

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

— The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy

American writer and literary critic

You call it hope — that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.

— Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poems

English philosopher and statesman

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

— The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon

French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

— Pensées

English poet and artist

How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing? How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing, And forget his youthful spring?

— Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Chilean poet and politician

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

— 100 Love Sonnets

Classical Athenian playwright

That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.

— Trojan women: The Trojan women by Euripedes, and Helen, and Orestes by Ritsos

English poet and civil servant

And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

— The Complete Poetry

British author and scholar

One! two! and through and through / The vorpal blade went snickersnack! He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.

— Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Bengali poet, philosopher and polymath

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

— Lover's Gift