A Quote by Plato

Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.

Plato

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Plato
Greek - Philosopher
427 BC - 347 BC

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

Rick Riordan

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

Soren Kierkegaard

Would you ask Picasso to explain 'Guernica?' Would you ask Nabokov to explain 'Lolita?' Would you ask Tolstoy about 'War and Peace?' No, you wouldn't dare.

Michael Cimino

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Yehuda Amichai

He has more of a right to ask us why so many people are starving [than we do to ask Him]. As much as we want God to explain himself to us, His creation, we are in no place to demand that He give an account to us.

Francis Chan

It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews. The Jews have never produced a true poet. Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.

Richard Wagner

I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant

Samuel Beckett

If you let other people do some of the work that we ask ourselves to do, if you allow for the fact that we are ourselves dependent on and distributed over and in a way made up out of the world and processes around us then we can explain certain questions that we otherwise cannot explain and moreover we discover that we are not aliens in a strange world.

Alva Noe

We cannot ask in behalf of Christ what Christ would not ask Himself if He were praying.

A. B. Simpson

The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!

Thomas Carlyle

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

Donald Hall

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.

Cornel West

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

Bob Dylan

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.

B. F. Skinner

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

Arthur Rimbaud

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