A Quote by Anne Hebert

Poetry cannot be explained, it must be lived.

Anne Hebert

Quote Topics

Cannot Explained Lived Must Poetry

Quote Author

Anne Hebert
Canadian - Poet
August 1, 1916 - January 22, 2000

Anyone who appears to be triggered out of watchfulness and into action by your appearance must be explained. Anyone observing you carefully must be explained. Anyone whose behavior seems to be geared to yours must be explained. If the explanation does not satisfy you, be ready to take appropriate defensive action.

Jeff Cooper

Sorrows cannot all be explained away in a life truly lived, grief and loss accumulate like possessions.

Stefan Kanfer

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

Haruki Murakami

God cannot be explained... God can only be lived.

Meher Baba

To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.

Lucy Larcom

There must be something good in a thing that pleases so many; even if it cannot be explained, it is certainly enjoyed.

Baltasar Gracian

An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly . . . A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity

Charles Ives

When the crying child is immediately isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever annoys others must not be with them, if this isolation is the absolute result and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable.

Ellen Key

What can be explained is not poetry.

William Butler Yeats

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

Fernando Pessoa

The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun vowing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.

John Keats

Some things cannot be explained. This is part of the magic of life. There cannot be a word or an idea or a definition attached to everything.

Jim James

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.