Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Poets - Page 17
Explore popular quotes by famous poets.
The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.
The garden of love is green without limit and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy. Love is beyond either condition: without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh.
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
Everything that's bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that's the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.
It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task.
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.
The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.
Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.
Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.
The snowdrop and primrose our woodlands adorn, and violets bathe in the wet o' the morn.
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Still, I have been no one's enemy but my own. My easy nature, either in drinking or anything else, was always ready to submit to persuasions of profligate companions, who often led me into snares.
Of course God will forgive me; that's His job.
And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.
The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
Love is being stupid together.
I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Givers of great dinners know few enemies.
All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.
I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear - that's what makes it powerful.
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
I grew up thinking I was going to change the world, but not because I was treated like a special snowflake. It's a silly label. People are starving. We need to feed them. That's the end of the conversation.
The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.
I don't think 'Citizen Kane' stands more than one watch. Power corrupts. Who didn't know that?
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.
When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on.
I should like to use another word: 'audience' or 'reader' or 'listener' seems inadequate. I suggest the old word 'witness,' which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.
As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.
If you never take a chance, you will never be defeated - but you will never accomplish anything either.
Beware, so long as you live, of judging men by their outward appearance.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.
Flatterers look like friends, as wolves like dogs.
I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.
A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.
And all for love, and nothing for reward.
Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.
A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else.
Beauty awakens the soul to act.
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.
They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.
I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.
We are born of love; Love is our mother.
That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.
I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
