1.
If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there.
Khalil Gibran
2.
First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I'm not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I'm not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I'm not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me.
Martin Niemoller
3.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
Verse is the unrestrained effusion of intense emotions: it stems from sentiment remembered in peace.
4.
All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.'
Sonia Sanchez
All scribes, all authors are ideological. They either back the current conditions, or they state, 'Something is amiss, let's reform it for the best.'
5.
The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.
Countee Cullen
All of our actions and words carry weight; every choice we make has an impact on another person, be it positive or negative.
6.
I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
Michael Faraday
I am not a bard, however if you think independently as I explain, the details will construct a poetic verse in your thoughts.
7.
If you deconstruct Greece, you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you reconstruct her.
Odysseas Elytis
8.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
9.
You never wish on shooting stars. You wish on the ones that have the courage to shine where they are.
Andrea Gibson
10.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
11.
It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.
Lord Byron
12.
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
13.
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
Dennis Gabor
14.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
Philip Larkin
15.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
16.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot
17.
War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
Paul Valery
18.
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.
Gilles Deleuze
20.
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.
Commenting to him about the poetry J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote.
Paul Dirac
21.
I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don't have to write anymore.
Tukaram
22.
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
Billy Collins
23.
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Gustave Flaubert
26.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon
27.
When the tea is brought at five o'clock
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes
Is suddenly purring there.
Harold Monro
28.
In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.
Matsuo Basho
29.
He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels
Henri Michaux
31.
United States: the country where liberty is a statue.
Nicanor Parra
32.
They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.
John Keats
33.
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
Dylan Thomas
34.
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.
Peggy Noonan
35.
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.
Sharon Olds
36.
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
Robert Indiana
37.
Forests may be gorgeous but there is nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery.
Andrea Gibson
38.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
39.
Let no-one say the past is dead, the past is all about us and within.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal
40.
The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.
Anne Bancroft
42.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot
43.
A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
W. H. Auden
44.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz
45.
You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.
Bob Dylan
47.
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
48.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
Derek Walcott
49.
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis
50.
Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.
C.D. Wright