A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without…

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early…

— Umberto Eco

Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to…

— Josephine Jacobsen

The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

— Louise Glück

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes…

— Virginia Woolf

If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make…

— Charles Darwin

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

— Edward Hirsch

“Everyone's life is a poetry rhymed with sweet and bitter words, rhythmed with moments.”

— Robert Ahanes

My research is like my feeling, directed towards what is the principle value in the life--the poetry.

— Le Corbusier

“Poet' had always sounded like a profession to me, or a talent. But the dead American [Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry] made it…

— Ariel Gore

“But that's a good match for the way I've always approached life. I've always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they…

— Jay-Z

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the…

— Walt Whitman

“What would it profit us, after all, even from a purely practical viewpoint, if we stripped life of all poetry, all dreams, all beautiful…

— Knut Hamsun

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

— Peter Davison

“That’s the beauty of poetry,” I said. “That language is inadequate to describe life. So poetry just tries to bring up emotions. Just read…

— Victor Methos

“Poetry is not life. Life is poetry.”

— Laurence Overmire