130 Poet Quotes

Following is our list of poet quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about writers and poets.

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Famous Poet Quotes

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. — Soren Kierkegaard

Always be a poet, even in prose. — Charles Baudelaire

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. — Randall Jarrell

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

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

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — W. H. Auden

You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist. — Bob Dylan

The true poet, is like a man who's happy anywhere, in endless measure, if he's allowed to look at leaves and grass, to see the sun rise and set. — Jacob Grimm

With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult. — Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

The mind of a poet often performs miracles-a few coarse-grained words, apprehended become bullets and roses. — Amado V. Hernandez

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown. — Sharon Olds

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet. — Mahatma Gandhi

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy. — Martin Heidegger

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator. — Ben Jonson

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. — Jean Cocteau

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way. — Jim Jarmusch

Short Poet Quotes

  • A life without love is like a tree without fruit. — Stephen King
  • Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. — Zelda Fitzgerald
  • Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance. — Anne Sexton
  • Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. — Rumi
  • I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island. — Thornton Wilder
  • Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. — Rudyard Kipling
  • Your True Nature Is Love. There's Nothing You Can Do About It. — Byron Katie
  • They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win. — Howard Zinn
  • Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist. — Steven Seagal
  • While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep. — Alexander Pope

Poet Image Quotes

Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quote

Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Poet quote At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

I Am A Poet Quotes

I am a black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of blackness. I consider myself neither poet, composer, or musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth that they hope may lead to peace and salvation. — Gil Scott-Heron

I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. — Wilfred Owen

The young artist of today need no longer say 'I am a painter,' or 'a poet,' or 'a dancer.' He is simply an 'artist.' All of life will be open to him. — Allan Kaprow

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

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance. — Anne Bradstreet

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box. — Anne Sexton

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. — Daphne Du Maurier

Poet quote A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.
A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form. — Shirin Neshat

I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet. — Leni Riefenstahl

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick! — Jonas Mekas

I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet. — Aristide Maillol

Writers And Poets Quotes

The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects. — Lafcadio Hearn

Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Those who perceive in themselves... the artistic vocation as poet, writer, sculptor, painter, musician, and actor feel at the same time an obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it to service of their neighbour and the humanity as a whole. — Pope John Paul II

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet. — Anne Stevenson

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling

Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. — Trent Zelazny

A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience. — Joan Aiken

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. — Samuel McChord Crothers

The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn. — Nikki Giovanni

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate. — Raymond Carver

Poetry By Poets Quotes

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

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. — Kenneth Rexroth

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. — Robin Williams

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. — Sigmund Freud

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. — Ted Hughes

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot

The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar. — Henry Miller

The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved. — Franz Grillparzer

the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived? — Galway Kinnell

Romantic Poet Quotes

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. — E. M. Forster

Summer's lease hath all too short a date. — William Shakespeare

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. — Bruce Lee

Romantic Art: The Hearts Awakening - Bouguereau At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. — Plato

The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. — E. M. Forster

I'll be a poet, and you'll be poetry. — Francois Coppee

The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: “A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there’s more conversation. — Brian D. McLaren

Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets. — George Murray

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at. — John Dufresne

Poem 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

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

Listen with your heart, you will understand. — Pocahontas

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

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

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

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

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

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 Poet

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Read quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard

469 7614
Read quotes by Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire
quotes on love, law

323 2373
Read quotes by Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell
quotes on death, writing and love

92 115
Read quotes by David Carradine

David Carradine
quotes on death, life and love

22 169
Read quotes by W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden
quotes on love

431 3476
Read quotes by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan
quotes on life, love and war

868 4662

More Poet Quotes

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. — Plato

The female doesn't want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and say : 'Here is your home country.' — Nizar Qabbani

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can. — John Trudell

The great religions are the ships, Poets the life boats. Every sane person I know has jumped overboard. — Hafez

All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.' — Sonia Sanchez

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it. — Salvador Dali

I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. — Sayings

This is not a time to keep the facts from the people-to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. — John F. Kennedy

In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods. — Edward Hirsch

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky

I would rather win souls than be the greatest king or emperor on earth; I would rather win souls than be the greatest general that ever commanded an army; I would rather win souls than be the greatest poet, or novelist, or literary man who ever walked the earth. My one ambition in life is to win as many as possible. — R. A. Torrey

Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth. — Edmondo De Amicis

...he who has seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear himself away from it again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are keen and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both. — Konrad Lorenz

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius. — Albert Pike

If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage. — Del Close

Avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason boys - to woo women - and in that endeavor, laziness will not do. — Robin Williams

Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine? — John Keats

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. — Derek Walcott

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published. — Jim Jarmusch

The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the break up of the self and, through the rearrangement and reassemble of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness, perfection, new meaning. — Heinz Kohut

Boys, you must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin the less likely you are to find it at all. — Robin Williams

Black is not sad. Bright colours are what depress me. They're so... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not. — Ann Demeulemeester

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else. — Billy Collins

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul. — Derek Walcott

Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse?a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance. — Louis Untermeyer

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. — Barack Obama

In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references! — Bart D. Ehrman

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