61 Inspiring Quotes From Poets

In the world of literature, poetry stands as a timeless vessel of human emotion and intellect, capturing the essence of our most profound feelings and experiences. Poets, with their unique ability to distill complex emotions into succinct and beautiful language, offer us insights and inspiration that resonate across generations. As we delve into a collection of inspiring quotes from some of the world's most revered poets, we invite you to journey through their words that challenge, uplift, and inspire. Whether you're seeking motivation, solace, or a new perspective, these curated quotes promise to ignite your imagination and speak to the soul.

1. “To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.” - George Eliot

2. “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” - Herman Hesse

3. “The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.” - Mary Lascelles

4. “Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.” - Dorianne Laux

5. “You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.” - Dorianne Laux

6. “You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.” - Rick Riordan

7. “You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

8. “If I had a soul I sold itfor pretty wordsIf I had a body I usedit up spurting my essenceAllen Ginsberg warns youdont follow my pathto extinction” - Allen Ginsberg

9. “Time changes nothing, girl, but the size of your underwear. . .and hopefully your hairdo.” - Minton Sparks

10. “When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?” - Alysha Speer

11. “I saw the spiders marching through the air,Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed dayIn latter August when the hayCame creaking to the barn. But whereThe wind is westerly,Where gnarled November makes the spiders flyInto the apparitions of the sky,They purpose nothing but their ease and dieUrgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;” - Robert Lowell

12. “Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.” - Rabih Alameddine, (The Hakawati)

13. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde

14. “After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin.Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.” - Piet Hein

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

16. “The poet is rather one who inspires than one inspired.” - Paul Eluard

17. “A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.” - E.B. White

18. “When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.” - Idris SHah

19. “The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning.” - L.J. Smith

20. “God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods...” - Socrates

21. “Songs of myselfI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,..” - Walt Whitman

22. “Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough.” - John Keats

23. “Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!” - Langston Hughes

24. “No thought is a stupid thought, those who are thoughtless are thought of as stupid.” - Nate Spears

25. “Any hand can condem, but it takes a helping hand to build.” - Nate Spears

26. “When confronted with suffering that won't go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,...not on the Master's hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it's just that you're in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you... will begin to see the patterns. You'll become a poet, sensitive to your Father's voice.” - Paul E. Miller

27. “ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink.” - Melissa Lee-Houghton

28. “Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.” - Washington Irving

29. “I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen” - Luke Davies

30. “Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.” - Philip Larkin

31. “There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!” - Philip Larkin

32. “I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.” - Philip Larkin

33. “Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.” - Philip Larkin

34. “If I knew what to doI'd do more than write a song for you” - Criss Jami

35. “The world holds two classes of men--intelligent men without religion, and religious men withoutintelligence.poet” - ~ Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri, 973-1057, Syrian

36. “Dear Gris, if there's one thing I can't abide it's a bad poet.” - Cat Hellisen

37. “Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.” - Jeanette Winterson

38. “Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful” - Laura Goode

39. “This one is for our crew, but it’s also for all the weird girls and word nerds, for all the in-the-middle wickeds and queers and misfits and hell-raisers.” - Laura Goode

40. “Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.” - Libba Bray

41. “Intellectuals are rebels, not revolutionaries.” - César Vallejo

42. “The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.” - César Vallejo

43. “Aviation in air, in water and in spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies.” - César Vallejo

44. “The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art.” - César Vallejo

45. “I have wished you something None of the others would....” - Philip Larkin

46. “poems are small moments of enlightenment” - Natalie Goldberg

47. “Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.” - Jeffrey R. Anderson

48. “كمن يعود من فردوس مفقود عدتُ من عناقك.‏ كمن يعود من بلد السيوف عدتُ من دموعك.‏ توثبٌ متأخرٌ بقي مثل حلمٍ بين تلك المساءات.‏ ثم رحتُ أُدرك الليالي.‏ والانكسارات.‏” - خورخي لويس بورخيس

49. “The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses” - Arthur Rimbaud

50. “Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It's me And who is the poet writing this poem? That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles” - Pierre Albert-Birot

51. “I may not be able to say these words to you but that doesn't mean I can't say it to the rest of the world. I'm not a poet. Nor do I try to be one. I simply share what I do in my spare time. All poetry springs from genuine feelings. I'm only a woman expressing herself to the world.” - Tammy-Louise Wilkins

52. “...you called me poet-priest - I am. ...devoted to my art, faithful to you...or, is the other way around?...” - John Geddes

53. “...what else would a poet priest do on an endless night, but write of love?...” - John Geddes

54. “... paint in blue and black...sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...” - John Geddes

55. “[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)” - Pierre Reverdy

56. “How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.” - Charles Bukowski

57. “That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.” - George MacDonald

58. “I think of New York City lost in starsforgotten as a blue haired pet of childhood love Tonight the night is full;” - Gregory Corso

59. “He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal.” - S. T. Coleridge

60. “We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.” - Emily Dickinson

61. “Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit.These are the things all the great philosophersjust won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathingAnd you keep writing-creating because that’s what you doAnd that’s who you are. There are no magical voices to guideYou except your own. Make it count.~ R.M. ENGELHARDT” - R.M. Engelhardt