Poet Quotes · Page 62

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very…

— Mark Twain

Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“A writer, an author or a poet does not write because of a public or herself. She lives by a great youth.”

— Petra Hermans

“When humankind cannot produce a philosopher to speak its mind, it longs for a poet to sing its heart”

— Subhan Zein

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If we learn to love someone for their imperfections that reflect our own, we eventually appreciate the thought that even the most…

— Nicola An

a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

— Vladimir Nabokov

To me the Muses truly gave / An envied and a happy lot: / E'en when I lie within the grave, /…

— Sappho

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering,…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English…

— Andrew Hoberek

This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the…

— Indu Sundaresan

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps…

— Louis Auchincloss

We may have an excellent ear for music, without being able to perform in any kind; we may judge well of poetry,…

— Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York…

— Kenneth Koch

The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a…

— Charles D'Ambrosio

Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to…

— Aiden Wilson Tozer

“Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.”

— Kamand Kojouri

'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to…

— Jenny Zhang

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden…

— Oscar Wilde

My dad was a poet. He saw the world through unique glasses, with simplicity, spirituality, and humor.

— John Carter Cash

The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression,…

— Robert Schumann

The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search…

— Yang Wanli

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

— Howard Nemerov

“Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.”

— Federico García Lorca

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

— Henry Moore

I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.

— Anne Sexton

Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants…

— Henry David Thoreau

The deity on purpose [sings] the liveliest of all lyrics through the most miserable poet.

— Plato

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a…

— Wallace Stevens

Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate, For morning dreams, as poets tell, are true.

— Michael Bruce

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be…

— Billy Collins

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

— Paul Valery

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision…

— Rita Dove

You need to have a God, a lover, and an enemy, says the poet. Exactly: you need to have three enemies.

— Jose Bergamin

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

— Gregory Orr

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would…

— Nikki Giovanni

Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.

— Ken Kesey

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they…

— Paul Valery

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

— Diane Wakoski

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.

— Alfred de Vigny