Joseph Brodsky Quotes

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

Joseph Brodsky

• Poetry

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Quotes to Explore

• Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

  

  Joanne Rowling
  • Myself
  • Poetry
  • Now And Then

• With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

  

  Edgar Allan Poe
  • Passion
  • Purpose
  • Poetry

• I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.

  

  Gabrielle Aplin
  • Poetry
  • Inspiration
  • Songs

• There's nothing more fun than making fun of what's sacred.

  

  Adam McKay
  • Fun
  • Nothing
  • More

• For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

  

  F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • You
  • Poetry
  • Quit

• Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

  

  Benjamin Hammond "Ben" Haggerty
  • People
  • Reading
  • Poetry

• If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

  

  Wallace Stevens
  • Poetry
  • Bible
  • Same

• Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

  

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • Music
  • Art
  • Poetry

• Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

  

  Mahmoud Darwish
  • Beautiful
  • Peace
  • Poetry

• It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.

  

  Orson F. Whitney
  • May
  • Success
  • Poetry

• My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.

  

  Kate Thompson
  • Book
  • Poetry
  • Down

• Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

  

  Octavio Paz
  • Society
  • Poetry
  • Morality

• Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

  

  Ian Hamilton Finlay
  • Up
  • Different
  • Bad

• I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

  

  Taylor Swift
  • Work
  • Simple
  • Poetry

• 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
  • Time
  • May
  • Poetry

• It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • True
  • Poetry
  • Literature

• Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

  

  Orson F. Whitney
  • History
  • Mother
  • Poetry

• I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

  

  J. Carter Brown
  • Music
  • Poetry
  • Arts

• Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

  

  Steve Earle
  • Poetry
  • Hardest

• Use the light that is in you to recover your natural clearness of sight.

  

  Lao Tzu
  • Use
  • Recover
  • Clearness

• This is a generalization, but I think women's brains are more accessible to ideas and differences. And they can accept stuff that's weirder. I think there are enough intelligent men out there who get it, but women will watch behavior that's different and process it better. In general, women are less threatened by their emotions.

  

  Albert Brooks
  • Men
  • Different
  • Women

• I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward.

  

  Carl Andre
  • Good
  • Great
  • Small

• Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.

  

  W. H. Auden
  • Time
  • Freedom
  • Moral

• If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

  

  Joseph Brodsky
  • Poetry