81 Inspiring Poetry Quotes

In the world of literature, poetry stands out as a profound means to express emotions, articulate thoughts, and explore the depths of the human experience. Whether it's the delicate beauty of a haiku, the structured elegance of a sonnet, or the free-flowing artistry of contemporary verse, poetry has the unique power to inspire, comfort, and provoke thought. Today, we invite you to delve into a carefully curated collection of the top 81 inspiring poetry quotes. These timeless lines capture the essence of life, love, and the myriad of feelings that bind us all. Join us on this lyrical journey, and let these words ignite your imagination and stir your soul.

1. “This autumn-why am I growing old?bird disappearing among clouds.” - Basho Matsuo

2. “Calligraphy of geeseagainst the sky-the moon seals it.” - Buson Yosa

3. “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.” - Dylan Thomas

4. “My candle burns at both ends;It will not last the night;But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—It gives a lovely light!” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

5. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside youGliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hoodedI do not know whether a man or a woman-But who is that on the other side of you?” - T.S. Eliot

6. “I know you're tired but come, this is the way.” - Jalalu'l-din Rumi

7. “and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it” - Nikki Giovanni

8. “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,— Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.To Solitude” - John Keats

9. “Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)” - William Shakespeare

10. “Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” - Wallace Stevens

11. “Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

12. “They say that “time assuages,”— Time never did assuage; An actual suffering strengthens, As sinews do, with age. Time is a test of trouble, But not a remedy. If such it prove, it prove too There was no malady.” - Emily Dickinson

13. “If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.” - Sarah Vowell

14. “Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone,While pain and guilt still linger here below,Blindness and numbness--these please me alone;Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.” - Michelangelo Buonarroti

15. “Right words are born in courage, which results from our struggle to make sense of our various predicaments. Cheer is what words are "trying to tell us/... It's native to the words/and what they want us always to know/even when it seems quite impossible to do.” - William Meredith

16. “The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride, Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide, Earth a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true,And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.” - Emily Dickinson

17. “I sometimes hold it half a sinTo put in words the grief I feel;For words, like Nature, half revealAnd half conceal the Soul within.But, for the unquiet heart and brain,A use in measured language lies;The sad mechanic exercise,Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,Like coarsest clothes against the cold:But that large grief which these enfoldIs given in outline and no more.In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5” - Alfred Tennyson

18. “Look, the treesare turningtheir own bodiesinto pillarsof light,are giving off the richfragrance of cinnamonand fulfillment,the long tapersof cattailsare bursting and floating away overthe blue shouldersof the ponds,and every pond,no matter what itsname is, isnameless now.Every yeareverythingI have ever learnedin my lifetimeleads back to this: the firesand the black river of losswhose other sideis salvation,whose meaningnone of us will ever know.To live in this worldyou must be ableto do three things:to love what is mortal;to hold itagainst your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go.” - Mary Oliver

19. “Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...” - Fernando Pessoa

20. “Tho' you're tired and weary, still journey on, Till you come to your happy abode,Where all the love you've been dreaming of,Will be there at the end of the road.” - Harry Lauder

21. “Eché mi esperanza al mar:y aún fue en el mar, mi esperanza verde-mar...” - Dulce Maria Loynaz

22. “loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shapeof a helicopter the same size as the helicopterand that's it's only skilland it isn't good enoughbut it's still amazing.” - Tao Lin

23. “HarlemWhat happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.Or does it explode?” - Langston Hughes

24. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.” - T.S. Eliot

25. “It was not like everyone had said.Not like being needed,or needing; not desperate;it did not whisperthat I'd come to harm. I didn't losemy head. No, I was notgoing to leap from a greatheight and flapmy wings.It was in factthe opposite of flying:it contained the wishto be toppled, to be on the floor,the ground, anywhere I mightlie down. . . .On my back, and you on me.” - Deborah Garrison

26. “A Dream Within A DreamTake this kiss upon the brow!And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow-You are not wrong, who deemThat my days have been a dream;Yet if hope has flown awayIn a night, or in a day,In a vision, or in none,Is it therefore the less gone?All that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream.I stand amid the roarOf a surf-tormented shore,And I hold within my handGrains of the golden sand-How few! yet how they creepThrough my fingers to the deep,While I weep- while I weep!O God! can I not graspThem with a tighter clasp?O God! can I not saveOne from the pitiless wave?Is all that we see or seemBut a dream within a dream?” - Edgar Allen Poe

27. “On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.I wipe them away with a black woolly gloveAnd try not to notice I've fallen in loveOn Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.But the juke-box inside me is playing a songThat says something different. And when was it wrong?On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hairI am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.the head does its best but the heart is the boss-I admit it before I am halfway across” - Wendy Cope

28. “The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day—terrified of letting him slip and tumble—I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. 'I am so sorry,' said this courteous old genius. 'But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?' I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn't hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. 'You will remember,' he said, 'the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.' And he then recited the following:What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to broodHow that face shall watch his when cold it lies?Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—'Inclusiveness'—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my thanks when he said, again with utter composure: 'While you are in Chile do you plan a call on General Pinochet?' I replied with what I hoped was equivalent aplomb that I had no such intention. 'A pity,' came the response. 'He is a true gentleman. He was recently kind enough to award me a literary prize.' It wasn't the ideal note on which to bid Borges farewell, but it was an excellent illustration of something else I was becoming used to noticing—that in contrast or corollary to what Colin MacCabe had said to me in Lisbon, sometimes it was also the right people who took the wrong line.” - Christopher Hitchens

29. “Failing and Flying"Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.It's the same when love comes to an end,or the marriage fails and people saythey knew it was a mistake, that everybodysaid it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anythingworth doing is worth doing badly.Like being there by that summer oceanon the other side of the island whilelove was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights thatanyone could tell you they would never last.Every morning she was asleep in my bedlike a visitation, the gentleness in herlike antelope standing in the dawn mist.Each afternoon I watched her coming backthrough the hot stony field after swimming,the sea light behind her and the huge skyon the other side of that. Listened to herwhile we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people whocame back from Provence (when it was Provence)and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,but just coming to the end of his triumph.” - Jack Gilbert

30. “Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--” - Franz Wright

31. “Make me, dear Lord, polite and kind, To everyone, I pray.And may I ask you how you find Yourself, dear Lord, today?” - John Banister Tabb

32. “holding a tiny dixie cup in my hand makes me feel like a giant human being that can crush things” - Brandon Scott Gorrell

33. “We do not play on Graves—Because there isn't Room—Besides—it isn't even—it slantsAnd People come—And put a Flower on it—And hang their faces so—We're fearing that their Hearts will drop—And crush our pretty play—And so we move as farAs Enemies—away—Just looking round to see how farIt is—Occasionally— ” - Emily Dickinson

34. “Deprivation is the mother of poetry.” - Leonard Cohen

35. “Love life, Live Love” - Benny Bellamacina

36. “My Papa's Waltz:The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother's countenanceCould not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.” - Theodore Roethke

37. “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

38. “How can the bird that is born for joySit in a cage and sing?How can a child, when fears annoy,But droop his tender wing,And forget his youthful spring?” - William Blake

39. “Only God can mend a broken heart.” - Kevin Walker

40. “I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.” - Philip Larkin

41. “I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalive for a little while.” - Mary Oliver

42. “It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.” - Kay Ryan

43. “A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.” - John Ashbery

44. “This man has talent, that man geniusAnd here's the strange and cruel difference:Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.” - William Henry Davies

45. “The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. Full tonight.So we goand the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit,I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up intomy face. As though I werehis perfect moon.” - Mary Oliver

46. “The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.” - Aldous Huxley

47. “To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty as those who abuse. Stand up for the innocent or go down with the rest.” - Flora Jessop

48. “Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies” - Oscar Sparrow

49. “JapanToday I pass the time readinga favorite haiku,saying the few words over and over.It feels like eatingthe same small, perfect grapeagain and again.I walk through the house reciting itand leave its letters fallingthrough the air of every room.I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.I say it in front of a painting of the sea.I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.I listen to myself saying it,then I say it without listening,then I hear it without saying it.And when the dog looks up at me,I kneel down on the floorand whisper it into each of his long white ears.It’s the one about the one-tontemple bellwith the moth sleeping on its surface,and every time I say it, I feel the excruciatingpressure of the mothon the surface of the iron bell.When I say it at the window,the bell is the worldand I am the moth resting there.When I say it into the mirror,I am the heavy belland the moth is life with its papery wings.And later, when I say it to you in the dark,you are the bell,and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,and the moth has flownfrom its lineand moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.” - Billy Collins

50. “I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn this world was you.I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.” - Maya Angelou (Author)

51. “The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false word. You could never underestimate an audience. They had paid to get in; they had paid for drinks; they intended to get something and if you didn't give it to them they'd run you right into the ocean.” - Charles Bukowski

52. “I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.” - Francesca Lia Block

53. “¿Os dais cuenta cabal de la cadena de crímenes tramados por la nena? Crimen número uno: la acusada comete allanamiento de morada. Crimen número dos: el personaje se queda con tres platos de potaje. Crimen número tres: la muy cochina destroza una sillita isabelina. Crimen número cuatro: va la dama y se limpia los zapatos en la cama... Un juez no dudaría ni un instante: «¡Diez años de presidio a esa tunante!». Pero en la historia, tal como se cuenta, la miserable escapa tan contenta mientras los niños gritan, encantados: «¡Qué bien; Ricitos de oro se ha salvado!».” - Roald Dahl

54. “in a slapfight with Jesusmy face bleedsbecause no one cut their fingernails back then” - Daniel Bailey

55. “Poetry doesn’t pay. But I need it. And so do you.” - Cory Basil

56. “At NightLove said, "Wake still and think of me,"Sleep, "Close your eyes till break of day,"But Dreams came by and smilinglyGave both to Love and Sleep their way.” - Sara Teasdale

57. “Time passes too fast.Like a hummingbird flying by,it’s just a blur to my eyes.” - Amanda Leigh

58. “There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. ” - Gerald Hausman

59. “Please lift your snowy skies off my soul -Your diamond dreams slice through my veins” - Else Lasker-Schüler

60. “This was what the poets couldn't put in their poetry, she thought dumbly, the rush of desire so fierce and pure it made one shake, all on the force of a word.” - Lauren Willig

61. “My true-love hath my heart and I have his,By just exchange one for the other given:I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;There never was a bargain better driven.His heart in me keeps me and him in one;My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:He loves my heart, for once it was his own;I cherish his because in me it bides.His heart his wound received from my sight;My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;For as from me on him his hurt did light,So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,My true-love hath my heart and I have his.” - Philip Sidney

62. “So when you inhale and exhale, notice your breath and realize God is dwelling in your chest.” - Trinka Polite

63. “We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

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

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

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

67. “All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated To go peacefully And enjoy the eternal nap.” - Dejan Stojanovic

68. “Tein valintani kyllä -lähtekäämme matkaan!Kuultavan kultaisenakesäyö sarastaakotilaakson yllä.Joki kiskookiiltäen kuin teräs päin ulappaa.Sinä, joka itse olet lauluja jolla on laulun mahti,ota oman itsesi tahti!Sainko sinut vihdoinsatuuni vangiksivai pakenetkojälleen luotani?Sinä, joka itse olet laulu!Kas, tässä käteni!Pitkin jokea, joka huuhtookotirantaa,käy tieni päin ulappaaja päin merta -merten taa.Jos tiedän että seuraat,on minullekin maailmassavielä aamunmaa.” - Mikael Lybeck

69. “Kevään kukkienaikaan toivomme etteiolisi yötä,syksyllä kuutamossa,ettei päivä koittaisi.” - Saigyō Hōshi

70. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” - Emily Dickinson

71. “Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone. To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance (…) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.” - Richard Hugo

72. “Poetry lets me pour out my various emotions even the suppressed ones we didn't know exist inside us' til the moment you start jotting down what you're feeling. It's more than an escape into the unknown, a refuge for your creativity and sometimes wild imagination not all ordinary, ungifted people like us understand." -Elizabeth's Quotes” - Elizabeth E. Castillo

73. “I had never thought of haiku, or any kind of poetry for that matter, as a social activity.” - Abigail Friedman

74. “I wanted the past to go away, I wantedto leave it, like another country; I wantedmy life to close, and openlike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the songwhere it fallsdown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;I wantedto hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalivefor a little while.” - Mary Oliver

75. “Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” - Philip Larkin

76. “So we found the end of our journey.So we stood, alive in the river of light,Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.” - Ted Hughes

77. “Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rudeAnd fled to the silence of sweet solitude.” - John Clare

78. “A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.” - Anais Nin

79. “We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.” - Robert Kelly

80. “Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy.” - George Gordon Byron

81. “Football is the poetry of a motion.” - Pubudu Lasal Dissanayake