Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators…

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“When reading, one needs to remember that poets and philosophers are not prescribing courses of action but exploring aspects of existence.”

— Louise Cowan

“Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see…

— Fernando Pessoa

In the beginning the Poets and Philosophers taught the world to see. Then after that any form of education was no longer free.

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

“Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and…

— Gene Wolfe

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers…

— Thomas Aquinas

The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim…

— Anonymous

“A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing…

— Czesław Miłosz

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They…

— Helen Hayes

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

— Antonio Machado

“All philosophers must, therefore, doff their hats to the poets when they discover that the path of reason takes them only so far.”

— Hagiwara Sakutaro

At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and…

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race; they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the…

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Mr. Pickwick was a philosopher, but philosophers are only men in armour, after all.”

— Charles Dickens