71 Quotes From Famous Poets

In every corner of the world, poets have captured the essence of human experience through the delicate interplay of rhythm and language. Their words transcend time, offering solace, inspiration, and wisdom that resonate across generations. Whether contemplating the beauty of nature, the depths of love, or the intricacies of the human spirit, poets distill complex emotions into lines that echo within our hearts. In this curated collection, we delve into 71 profound quotes from renowned poets whose timeless insights continue to illuminate and enrich our lives. Join us on this journey through verse and discover the enduring power of poetic expression.

1. “Them lady poets must not marry, pal.” - John Berryman

2. “A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.” - H. L. Mencken

3. “Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house” - William Gass

4. “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

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

6. “We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.” - Wallace Stevens

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

8. “Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.” - Gustave Flaubert

9. “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” - Julian Barnes

10. “I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.” - Mary Karr

11. “the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.” - Annie Finch

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

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

14. “Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.” - Annie Finch

15. “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

16. “August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.” - Robert Hass

17. “Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wideThe chance won't come againAnd don't speak too soonFor the wheel's still in spinAnd there's no tellin' whoThat it's namin'For the loser nowWill be later to winFor the times they are a-changin'.” - Bob Dylan

18. “Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

19. “Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.” - Wendell Berry

20. “It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.” - G.K. Chesterton

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

22. “GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.” - Lisa Washington

23. “When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around us becomeslight, rare, sterile.We breathe, briefly.Our eyes, briefly,see witha hurtful clarity.Our memory, suddenly sharpened,examines,gnaws on kind wordsunsaid,promised walksnever taken.Great souls die andour reality, bound tothem, takes leave of us.Our souls,dependent upon theirnurture,now shrink, wizened.Our minds, formedand informed by theirradiance,fall away.We are not so much maddenedas reduced to the unutterable ignoranceof dark, coldcaves.And when great souls die,after a period peace blooms,slowly and alwaysirregularly. Spaces fillwith a kind ofsoothing electric vibration.Our senses, restored, neverto be the same, whisper to us.They existed. They existed.We can be. Be and bebetter. For they existed.” - Maya Angelou

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

25. “The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

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

27. “A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.” - Søren Kierkegaard

28. “A change of style is a change of meaning.” - Wallace Stevens

29. “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” - W.H. Auden

30. “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

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

32. “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.

33. “I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.” - Evelyn Waugh

34. “Latvieši, kā visiem zināms, ir dzejnieku tauta. Tikai pavisam retais latvietis nebūs vismaz jaunībā kaut drusku pavingrinājies dzejot… Zīmīgi un apbrīnojami, ka latviešu apsēstība ar dzeju izveidojusies par spīti tam, ka dzejo latviski ir nesalīdzināmi grūtāk nekā citās valodās. Patiesībā, tieši bezdievīgi grūti. Kā lai poēts uzlido poēzijas eteriskajos augstumos, ja kā dzirnavu akmens karājas kaklā stingais, negrozāmais uzsvars uz katra vārda pirmā balsiena? Un piedevām, nabaga latviešu dzejnieku līdz izmisumam vārdzina pagalam trūcīga atskaņu izvēle.” - Anšlavs Eglītis

35. “The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.” - Dan Simmons

36. “Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.” - Rick Yancey

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

38. “In the essence of truth lies deceit.” - Dejan Stojanovic

39. “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

40. “Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.” - Dejan Stojanovic

41. “Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.” - Dejan Stojanovic

42. “When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.” - Dejan Stojanovic

43. “We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.” - Dejan Stojanovic

44. “Teaching others, he corrected himself.” - Dejan Stojanovic

45. “We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.” - Dejan Stojanovic

46. “You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.” - Dejan Stojanovic

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

48. “We need knew knights, but without swords.” - Dejan Stojanovic

49. “Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.” - Dejan Stojanovic

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

51. “This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height.” - Dejan Stojanovic

52. “We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.” - Dejan Stojanovic

53. “There are no winners in real games.” - Dejan Stojanovic

54. “You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.” - Dejan Stojanovic

55. “We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.” - Dejan Stojanovic

56. “It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.” - Dejan Stojanovic

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

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

59. “They grew; they did not talk about growing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

60. “Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.” - Dejan Stojanovic

61. “There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all.” - Dejan Stojanovic

62. “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

63. “Hope without love is hopeless.” - Dejan Stojanovic

64. “I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.” - Dejan Stojnaovic

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

66. “Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.” - Dejan Stojanovic

67. “To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.” - Dejan Stojanovic

68. “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.” - Henry David Thoreau

69. “Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.” - Adrienne Rich

70. “Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.” - Fabrizio De André

71. “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