Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science — William Wordsworth
Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. — James Tate
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg
Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well. — Ajay Naidu
Short Poetry And Prose Quotes
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. — W. H. Auden
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it — Gustave Flaubert
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. — Edgar Allan Poe
a poem is like a wine glass in which you can hold up a little bit of reality and taste it. — Gwen Harwood
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon. — Linton Kwesi Johnson
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. — Novalis
Poetry And Prose Image Quotes
The best listeners listen between the lines.
Is Prose A Poetry Quotes
As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry. — Henry Purcell
You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry. — Satya Nadella
Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. — Christopher Fry
I have nature and art and poetry and if that is not enough, what is?
The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema. — Derek Jarman
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory. — George William Curtis
Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. — Henry David Thoreau
Wine is bottled poetry
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony. — Horace Walpole
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose. — Jerry B. Jenkins
An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy. — William C. Brown
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process. — Franz Grillparzer
Poetry Quotes
There comes a point in your life when you realize:
Who matters,
Who never did,
Who won't anymore,
And who always will.
So, don't worry about people from your past, there's a reason why they didn't make it to your future. — Adam Lindsay Gordon
Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that! It lights up the whole sky. — Unknown Author
We were together. I forget the rest. — Walt Whitman
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
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
Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky. — Rabindranath Tagore
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. — William Wordsworth
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
Painting And Poetry Quotes
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut
Starry Starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land. — Don McLean
I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music. — John Quincy Adams
The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. — Curt Sachs
If you don’t have at least a working knowledge of the Hawaiian language… you can’t chant well. You cannot… receive the images of poetry paints for you. It’s like having peas and no pod. — Keali'i Reichel
What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry. — Laurie Lee
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation. — Michelle Obama
The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - "can we really reach each other. — Leslie Marmon Silko
If geography is prose, maps are iconography. — Lennart Meri
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes. — Cole Porter
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor. — Derek Walcott
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. — Ernest Hemingway
Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance. — Amy Lowell
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. — Walter Benjamin
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. — Virginia Woolf
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. — Ernest Hemingway
Prose Writing Quotes
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane. — George Orwell
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton — Bill Vaughan
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose. — Barbara Tuchman
The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose. — Paul Laurence Dunbar
In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story. — Ben Bova
Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. — William Zinsser
There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers. — Ernest Hemingway
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
Poetry And Music Quotes
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
And gentle winds and waters near, make music to the lonely ear. — Lord Byron
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. — Dennis Gabor
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. — Walter Mosley
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. — Charles Darwin
Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. — Barack Obama
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. — Charles Darwin
One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about — May Sarton
What I think we need to do is infuse everyday and every action with the kind of values we hope will be in the future, with kindness, with nurturing, with dreams, ambition, using your talents, not resorting to violence, other forms of conflict resolution, with humor, with poetry, with music. — Gloria Steinem
Lyric Poetry Quotes
I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. — Archilochus
When you write a song, most of the words you use are in black and white, and then, from time to time, you use one that’s in color. These words in color are a part of ourselves, because we give them a meaning. If you like, we give them a third dimension. — Jacques Brel
Will you love me in December as you do in May,
Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?
When my hair has all turned gray,
Will you kiss me then and say,
That you love me in December as you do in May? — Jimmy Walker
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from. — David Whyte
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough. — A. E. Housman
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being. — John Drinkwater
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul. — Eugenio Montale
Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind. — Masiela Lusha
Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do. — Stephen Sondheim
Beautiful Prose Quotes
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose. — Lafcadio Hearn
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days). — Ian McEwan
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty. — John Cheever
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. — W. Somerset Maugham
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
The very term "turning pages" suggests nonstop action. But I am all about character and beautiful writing. I eat that up like popcorn. Whether a book is action-packed or not, all I need are well-written prose and quirky, fabulous characters to keep me going. — Elizabeth Wein
Mother Dolores Hart's prose is a reflection of the inner beauty she has always possessed. A fascinating read... and read again! — Robert Evans
The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency. — James Kelman
The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work. — Julianna Baggott
The raw beauty of Natalia Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity. — Hilma Wolitzer
Writing Poetry Quotes
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. — Matsuo Basho
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. — Gilles Deleuze
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery
It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die. — Oliver Burkeman
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
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. — Sharon Olds
Sometimes I wish I was poetic and subtle. I write very bold and blunt and tell it like it is. — Pink
In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music. — Renzo Piano
People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush. — Li-Young Lee
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. — Ryszard Kapuscinski
What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal. — Chinua Achebe
All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind. — Robert Kennedy
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time. — Christopher Fry
I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry. — Christopher Hitchens
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. — Voltaire
The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart. — Rabindranath Tagore
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose. — Walter Savage Landor
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation. — Clive James
Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music. — Gilbert Highet
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose. — Richard M. Nixon
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time. — Christopher Fry
The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. — Ursula K. Le Guin
There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it. — Richard Livingstone
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose. — J. K. Rowling
After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones. — William Shenstone
Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. — Amit Ray
Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements. — Amit Ray
Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry. — Michael Pollan
Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. — Herbert Read
In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros. — Forrest Gander
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds. — Joyce Carol Oates
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; --poetry = the best words in the best order. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Certainly I'm participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it's a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self - poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship. — Lidia Yuknavitch
I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition. — John Updike
I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink. — Ernest Hemingway
The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. — Edgar Allan Poe
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical. — William Shenstone
In Conclusion
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