167 Poem Quotes

Following is our list of poem quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about love poems.

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Famous Poem Quotes

A picture is a poem without words. — Horace

a poem is like a wine glass in which you can hold up a little bit of reality and taste it. — Gwen Harwood

Poetry is life distilled. — Gwendolyn Brooks

A poem is a frozen moment melted by each reader for themselves to flow into the here and now. — Hilde Domin

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. — Robert Frost

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties. — Anne Stevenson

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. — Thomas Gray

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off. — Mary Karr

Poetry is a sort of homecoming. — Paul Celan

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. — James Tate

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. - David Carradine

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. — David Carradine

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. — Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart. — Peggy Noonan

Short Poem Quotes

  • Listen with your heart, you will understand. — Pocahontas
  • The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word. — Mata Hari
  • Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. — Rumi
  • I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. — Joan Miro
  • One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. — William Butler Yeats
  • They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. — William Penn
  • There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. — Washington Irving
  • One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. — Paul Muldoon
  • I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. — Wislawa Szymborska
  • A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery

Poem Image Quotes

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. - Steven Wright quote

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. — Steven Wright

Poem quote We ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable wo
We ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Remains Poem Quotes

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing — Robert Bly

Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains. — Kahlil Gibran

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. — Denise Levertov

Poem quote If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. — C. S. Lewis

To a man who is uncorrupt and properly constituted, woman always remains something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem, and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel bindings. — James Parton

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered. — Lincoln Steffens

Poem quote A picture is a poem without words.
A picture is a poem without words.

Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi's poems reveal that he remains an extraordinary profound poet of prayer and praise. His is the most honorable and heroic of ambitions - to dress our broken world in the clothes of language, trust, and hope. — David St. John

Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed. — Thomas Harrison

The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes. — Denise Duhamel

The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he. — Henry David Thoreau

Love Poems Quotes

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything. — David Bowie

Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem. — Walt Whitman

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls . — Merce Cunningham

I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark. — Andrea Gibson

See the mountains kiss high Heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea - What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

For those who love... time is eternity. — Henry Van Dyke

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep... — Robert Frost

I am I and you are you, whatever we were to each other that we still are. — Henry Scott Holland

MOTHER (a word that means the world to me) — Eddy Arnold

Writing Poems Quotes

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. — Raymond Carver

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. — Paul Celan

The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. — Dylan Thomas

Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs. — Kendrick Lamar

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. — Robert Frost

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. — James Fenton

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery. — Robert Hayden

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy. — Matsuo Basho

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. — Derek Walcott

Spring Poems Quotes

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing. — E. E. cummings

Nothing is so beautiful as spring- When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the depths of your hopes and desires, lies your silent knowledge of the beyond, and like seeds dreaming beneath the snow, your heart dreams of spring. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. — Kahlil Gibran

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough. — A. E. Housman

Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil. — Reginald Heber

That God once loved a garden we learn in Holy writ. And seeing gardens in the Spring I well can credit it. — Winifred Mary Letts

You can't see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it's there. It's the same with spring. You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland. — Paul Fleischman

Spring comes: the flowers learn their colored shapes. — Maria Konopnicka

The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing. — William Carlos Williams

All things seem possible in May. — Edwin Way Teale

Memorial Day Poems Quotes

We cherish too, the Poppy red That grows on fields where valor led, It seems to signal to the skies That blood of heroes never dies. — Moina Michael

In Flanders fields the poppies blow. - John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow. — John McCrae

Our nation owes a debt to its fallen heroes that we can never fully repay, but we can honor their sacrifice. — Barack Obama

Green sods are all their monument; and yet it tells A nobler history than pillared piles, Or the eternal pyramids. — James Gates Percival

Honoring the sacrifices many have made for our country in the name of freedom and democracy is the very foundation of Veterans Day. — Charles Rangel

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. — William Shakespeare

On thy grave the rain shall fall from the eyes of a mighty nation! — Thomas William Parsons

They fell, but o'er their glorious grave Floats free the banner of the cause they died to save. — Francis Marion Crawford

The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below — John McCrae

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. — John McCrae

March Poems Quotes

A light exists in Spring Not present in the year at any other period When March is scarcely here. — Emily Dickinson

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. — Robert Frost

A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King. — Emily Dickinson

Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day. — Wilton E. Hall

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase. — E. B. White

O the green things growing, the green things growing, The faint sweet smell of the green things growing! I should like to live, whether I smile or grieve, Just to watch the happy life of my green things growing. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

I don't aspire, but I would be very happy if one of my poems suddenly offered someone a shady rest stop, a breather in our interminable march under the murderous, scorching heat of the superfluous. — Kiki Dimoula

November Poems Quotes

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November! — Thomas Hood

The season for enjoying the fullness of life - partaking of the harvest, sharing the harvest with others, and reinvesting and saving portions of the harvest for yet another season of growth. — Denis Waitley

November always seemed to me the Norway of the year. — Emily Dickinson

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Over the river and through the wood, To grandfather's house we go; The horse knows the way To carry the sleigh, Through the white and drifted snow. — Lydia M. Child

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change. — Edwin Way Teale

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn. — Charles Baudelaire

All in November's soaking mist We stand and prune the naked tree, While all our love and interest Seem quenched in the blue-nosed misery. — Ruth Pitter

Lest I should be old-fashioned, I'll put a trinket on. — Emily Dickinson

Once more the liberal year laughs out O'er richer stores than gems or gold: Once more with harvest song and shout Is nature's boldest triumph told. — John Greenleaf Whittier

Epic Poems Quotes

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done. — Seamus Heaney

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. — G. K. Chesterton

We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us. — Leo Tolstoy

Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

If a chap can't compose an epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he'll never do any good at all. — William Morris

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said. — Laurie Anderson

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. — H. L. Mencken

Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day. — Sophocles

Nature is a book of many pages and each page tells a fascinating story to him who learns her language. Our fertile valleys and craggy mountains recite an epic poem of geologic conflicts. The starry sky reveal gigantic suns and space and time without end. — A. E. Douglass

Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there-- put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet. — Daniel Handler

Verse Quotes

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds — Paul the Apostle

If God is for us, who can be against us? — Paul the Apostle

God is in control, and therefore in EVERYTHING I can give thanks - not because of the situation but because of the One who directs and rules over it. — Kay Arthur

God's Word never fails. He will always heal you if you dare to believe Him. Men are searching everywhere today for things with which they can heal themselves, and they ignore the fact that the Balm of Gilead (Jeremiah 8:22) is within easy reach. — Smith Wigglesworth

Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom. — Omar Khayyam

It represents a Bible verse I wear on my shoe. Philippians 4:13. It says 'I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.' It's also my mantra, how I get up for games and why I play the way I do. — Stephen Curry

Three things differentiate living from the soul verses living from the ego only: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to learn deep love over time. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart. — Paul the Apostle

Any artist that's as serious about making music as I am, I'm cool with that. But if you tellin' me, "Man, send me a verse and I'ma send you a verse." No. That's not collaborating. We don't know each other and I'm serous about this music. — Kevin Gates

Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. — John the Apostle

Poetry Is Quotes

If I could take your troubles I would toss them into the sea, But all these things I'm finding Are impossible for me. I cannot build a mountain Or catch a rainbow fair, But let me be what I know best, A friend that is always there. — Kahlil Gibran

Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that. — Rumi

With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring. — Oscar Wilde

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. — William Wordsworth

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, Keeps dropping keys all night long For the beautiful rowdy prisoners. — Hafez

Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy. — Nizar Qabbani

The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else. — Countee Cullen

What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow! — Sergei Rachmaninoff

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. — Matsuo Basho

People Writing About Poem

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Read quotes by Horace

Horace
quotes on love, augustus and education

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Read quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks
quotes on love, education and friendship

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Read quotes by Robert Frost

Robert Frost
quotes on life, love and nature

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Read quotes by Anne Stevenson

Anne Stevenson
quotes on education, leadership and life

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Read quotes by Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray
quotes on education, slavery and love

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Read quotes by Mary Karr

Mary Karr
quotes on love, friendship and life

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More Poem Quotes

New friends may be poems but old friends are alphabets. Don't forget the alphabets because you will need them to read the poems. — Unknown Author

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If I can stop one heart from breaking…” Emily Dickinson If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. — Emily Dickinson

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. — Dylan Thomas

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. — Gilda Radner

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. — Robert Frost

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little. — Stephen Spender

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project. — Gwendolyn Brooks

My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple. — Mata Hari

If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea? — David Lee Roth

It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it. — Alistair Cooke

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew. — Louis Aragon

My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields...it's more like a poem...and that's what I want to paint. — Joan Mitchell

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Ambroise Valery

Seek wisdom in books, rare manuscripts, and cryptic poems if you will, but seek it out also in simple stones, and fragile herbs, and in the cries of wild birds. Listen to the whisperings of the wind and the roar of water if you would discover magic, for it is here that the old secrets are preserved. — Scott Cunningham

My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy. — William Carlos Williams

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. — Dylan Thomas

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. — Robert Indiana

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