Poet Quotes
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For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.
Plato -
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Virginia Woolf
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov -
What poet would not grieve to see His brother write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.
Jonathan Swift -
I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
Yasiin Bey Black Star -
Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
Umberto Eco -
For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.
Plato -
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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Modern poets are bells of lead. They should tinkle melodiously but usually they just klunk.
Lord Dunsany -
Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
Yehuda Amichai -
“A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.”
Karl Weierstrass -
I want to be a poet. I don't want to talk about genies in bottles anymore.
Christina Aguilera -
Nobody has to tell nobody nothing,” I say, taking another step forward. “You never were a poet, were you, Todd?” he says.
Patrick Ness -
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
Herbert Spencer
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Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.
Andrew Motion -
When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.
William Collins -
Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration.
Gaston Bachelard -
There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said Truth is the daughter of Time. [Lat., Alius quidam veterum poetarum cuius nomen mihi nunc memoriae non est veritatem temporis filiam esse dixit.]
Aulus Gellius -
I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.
W. S. Merwin
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In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.
William H. Gass -
Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
When I have had enough of tears and love, I turn to some poet, and set out again for a new world.
Xavier de Maistre -
What the poet is searching for is not the fundamental I but the deep you.
Antonio Machado