Poetry Quotes

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot

Life, Time, Nothing

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
Richard Dawkins

Reality, Culture, Bible

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Victor Hugo

High, Both, State

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Metaphor, Slang

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
Emily Dickinson

Book, Away, Nor

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Edmund Burke

Art, Nothing, Existence

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats

Nature, Dead, Earth

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent Van Gogh

Easy, Looking, Paper

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
William Blake

Music, Human, Painting

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. Eliot

Business, Feelings, Find

I love romantic poetry.
Richard Dawkins

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire

Time, Drunk, Wish

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Niels Bohr

Used, Language, Facts

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

Friendship, Real, Precious

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
John Muir

Nature, Spiritual, Destroyed

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats

Others, Quarrel, Ourselves

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
Lord Byron

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
John Ruskin

Nature, Spirit, Star

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Allen Ginsberg

Mind, Human, Place

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
John Ruskin

Religion, Greatest, Human

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats

Thoughts, Almost, Surprise

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
Lord Byron

Two, Three, Painting

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Montessori

Beauty, Science, Nor

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg

Understand, Written

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell

Beauty, God, Men

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