Castration Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious... Poetry is a religion without hope.”

— Jean Cocteau

Poetry absolves spirituality from the dividedness of religions and provides us with a sanctuary that excludes no one.

— Vanna Bonta

I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent.…

— Katherine Anne Porter

Poetry is a religion with no hope.

— Jean Cocteau

If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.

— Octavio Paz

“Poetry resists academic pretension, just as the mystery of religious faith evaporates on contact with dogma.”

— Patrick White

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the deification of reality.

— Edith Sitwell

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.

— Jean Cocteau

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the…

— Germaine Greer

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

— Jean Cocteau

Where no interest is takes in science, literature and liberal pursuits, mere facts and insignificant criticisms necessarily become the themes of discourse; and minds,…

— Madame de Stael