34 Poets' Inspirational Quotes

Poetry has the extraordinary ability to capture the human experience in just a few lines, painting vivid pictures with the strokes of a pen. Poets distill emotions, thoughts, and moments into beautiful and poignant words that resonate deeply with readers. In this post, we’ve curated a collection of the top 34 poets' inspirational quotes to ignite your imagination and uplift your spirit. These quotes, timeless in their wisdom and beauty, are drawn from the works and musings of some of the most renowned poets throughout history. Let their words inspire you to see the world with new eyes and to find the poetry in everyday life.

1. “Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco: We got dressed and showed the houseYou live well the visitor saidThe slum must be inside you. If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..” - C.D. Wright

2. “Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.” - Sylvia Plath

3. “...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal?” - H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

4. “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” - N.H. Kleinbaum

5. “Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.” - Greg Bear

6. “A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.” - Wallace Stevens

7. “All good poems are victories over something.” - Stephen Dunn

8. “The bats inebriate the sky . . .” - A. E. Stallings

9. “Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.” - Robert Hass

10. “Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.” - William Stafford

11. “I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.” - Pablo Neruda

12. “In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.” - Edward Carpenter

13. “There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...” - Roger Cardinal

14. “I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it” - Marianne Moore

15. “Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")” - John Collier

16. “All things want to float.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

17. “We are all poets, really.” - Walter Lowenfels

18. “Nor is there wanting in the pressSome spirit to stand simply forth,Heroic in it nakedness,Against the uttermost of earth.The tale of earth's unhonored thingsSounds nobler there than 'neath the sun;And the mind whirls and the heart sings,And a shout greets the daring one.” - Robert Frost

19. “Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.” - Walt Whitman

20. “Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.” - Dejan Stojanovic

21. “Absolute equals nothingness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

22. “God is a cloud from which rain fell.” - Dejan Stojanovic

23. “Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.” - Dejan Stojanovic

24. “Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.” - Dejan Stojanovic

25. “Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.” - Dejan Stojanovic

26. “Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.” - Dejan Stojanovic

27. “His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

28. “Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.” - Dejan Stojanovic

29. “Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.” - Dejan Stojanovic

30. “If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.” - Dejan Stojanovic

31. “If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.” - Dejan Stojanovic

32. “Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

33. “A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams.” - Dejan Stojanovic

34. “We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.” - Dejan Stojanovic