57 Poets' Inspirational Quotes

In the vast tapestry of literature, poetry stands out as a beacon of human emotion, intellect, and reflection. Words carefully woven together by poets have the profound ability to inspire, challenge, and comfort us, reminding us of the beauty and complexity of life. Whether you're seeking a moment of solace or an invigorating spark of creativity, the wisdom encapsulated in a poet's words can offer new perspectives and ignite the imagination. Join us as we explore a curated collection of the top 57 poets' inspirational quotes that promise to uplift, motivate, and resonate with readers across all walks of 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. “The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.” - James Baldwin

3. “Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.” - George Eliot

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

5. “The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.” - Christopher Morley

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

7. “We must listen to poets.” - Gaston Bachelard

8. “but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.” - Oscar Wilde

9. “Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.” - Wallace Stevens

10. “I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.” - Kay Ryan

11. “Carpe diem.Seize the day, boys.Make your lives extraordinary” - Williams Robin Professor Keating

12. “When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano...” - Yannis Ritsos

13. “. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.” - Major Jackson

14. “Therefore, since the world has stillMuch good, but much less good than ill,And while the sun and moon endureLuck's a chance, but trouble's sure,I'd face it as a wise man would,And train for ill and not for good.” - A. E. Housman

15. “This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.” - William Stafford

16. “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

17. “One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.” - Robert Hass

18. “Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.” - Helen Vendler

19. “Poets make the best topographers.” - W.G. Hoskins

20. “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.” - G.K. Chesterton

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

22. “A poem is a meteor.” - Wallace Stevens

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

24. “A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

25. “О любви мы знаем немного. Любовь - что груша. Она сладкая и имеет определенную форму. Но попробуйте дать определение формы груши!© Лютик "Полвека поэзии” - Sapkovsky A.

26. “Behold yon rough and flinty roadWhere youth, now youth no more,Gropes whining, seeking crumbs of loavesHe cast away of yore.” - Emma Ghent Curtis

27. “I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.” - Peter Kreeft

28. “What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality.” - D.H. Lawrence

29. “Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.” - Allen Ginsberg

30. “Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ’s body.” - Dejan Stojanovic

31. “Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute.” - Dejan Stojanovic

32. “The world is God's salvation.” - Dejan Stojanovic

33. “The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.” - Dejan Stojanovic

34. “Absolute equals nothingness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

35. “Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.” - Dejan Stojanovic

36. “Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.” - Dejan Stojanovic

37. “Sunbathe from within.” - Dejan Stojanovic

38. “Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.” - Dejan Stojanovic

39. “How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.” - Dejan Stojanovic

40. “Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.” - Dejan Stojanovic

41. “How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.” - Dejan Stojanovic

42. “Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.” - Dejan Stojanovic

43. “In the lie of truth lies the truth.” - Dejan Stojanovic

44. “He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.” - Dejan Stojanovic

45. “Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

46. “Do not look too far for you will see nothing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

47. “Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.” - Dejan Stojanovic

48. “Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.” - Dejan Stojanovic

49. “Disease often comes with a smiling face.” - Dejan Stojanovic

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

51. “They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.” - Dejan Stojanovic

52. “From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.” - Dejan Stojanovic

53. “Without space, there is no time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

54. “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

55. “There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.” - Dejan Stojanovic

56. “Any society that produces twice as many lawyers as it does poets and preachers is doomed.” - John Fogarty

57. “I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders."--Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company” - Daniel H. Pink