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Poet Quotes

A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet.

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist...

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Boris PasternakSafe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings

To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look...

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Picture of C. S. Lewis
C. S. LewisThe Personal Heresy: A Controversy

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

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

I wait on my fix:I am a poetry junkie.

Picture of Charles Bukowski
Charles BukowskiPlay the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eter...

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Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician....

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Morning and eveningMaids heard the goblins cry:'Come buy our orchard fruits,Come buy, come buy

He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradit...

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City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course bra...

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Douglas AdamsThe Restaurant at the End of the Universe

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the planet of Golgafrincham: it is a plan...

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Douglas AdamsThe Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove ...

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You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.

How—I didn't know anyword for it—how "unlikely". . .How had I come to be here,like them, and overhea...

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One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,'the way one commits a crime.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!O falling fire and piercing cryand panic, and a weak mailed fistclench...

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We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.

The Poets light but Lamps-Themselves-go out-

Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term 'genius' when applied ...

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Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in a...

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Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had bee...

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Picture of Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García MárquezLove in the Time of Cholera

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of t...

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To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quic...

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That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why,...

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Picture of George MacDonald
George MacDonaldAt the Back of the North Wind

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them but what is un...

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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribe...

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Hermann HesseBäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte

And while he compared all these things which he was seeing with his eyes to the mental pictures he h...

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Hermann HesseStrange News from Another Star

Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cu...

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The man is either mad or he is making verses.

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left ...

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I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming...

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I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite...

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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Ve...

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J
John CrowleyAmerican Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a...

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Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child -...

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Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental br...

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Picture of Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón JiménezTime and Space: A Poetic Autobiography

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life valu...

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Picture of Joseph Campbell
Joseph CampbellPathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matter...

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It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician...

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Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll...

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Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

TO VICTOR HUGO OF MY CROW PLUTO “Even when the bird is walking we know that it has wings.”—VICTOR HU...

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In the days of Prismatic Colornot in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there w...

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TO A GIRAFFE If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal to be personal and undesirable to be literal—detr...

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ROSEMARY Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary— Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly— born of th...

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I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participa...

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Picture of Mark Rothko
Mark RothkoThe Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art

For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the hig...

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When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall g...

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In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, make...

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Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

Picture of Neil Gaiman
Neil GaimanThe Graveyard Book

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flightThe Stars before him from the Field of Night,Drives Nigh...

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Picture of Omar Khayyám
Omar KhayyámThe Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam

And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That ...

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And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came ...

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Picture of Pablo Neruda
Pablo NerudaThe Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

The poet is rather one who inspires than one inspired.

And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mi...

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It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise every...

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What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an exc...

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Picture of Peter Sloterdijk
Peter SloterdijkDu mußt dein Leben ändern

I have wished you something None of the others would....

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by childr...

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Picture of Philip Larkin
Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin: Letters to Monica

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't ...

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Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin: Letters to Monica

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

Picture of Philip Larkin
Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin: Letters to Monica

Every man is a poet when he is in love.

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet

A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiratio...

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The reason is that they utter these words of theirs not by virtue of a skill, but by a divine power ...

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Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy ...

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Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

we want it visible to showwhen even the most visible joy will reveal itselfonly when we have tran...

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For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great...

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If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not be...

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Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage ...

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Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personal...

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Picture of Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria RilkeLetters to a Young Poet

Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much t...

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In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with maje...

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All men are poets at heart.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profit...

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that i...

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My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;A-c...

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Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I've never been accused of poetry before.

I saw the spiders marching through the air,Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed dayIn latter Aug...

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Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He ...

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He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize hi...

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