Philosophers Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special…

— Robert Hass

“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop…

— Salman Rushdie

“There are anonymous poems and poets without poems.”

— Dejan Stojanovic

“There is more of a nation's politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic writers on public affairs…

— Woodrow Wilson

“Poetry was a way to combat the staid and formulaic language of politicians that opposed the flexible and dynamic language of poets and writers.”

— Azar Nafisi

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express…

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“Poets aren't poets because of the way they write, they are poets because of the way they see the world.”

— Brandon Gene Petit

“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body.”

— John Keats

“The world is in trouble because of a few funny sympathetic philosophers”

— M.F. Moonzajer

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

— Seamus Heaney