Poets Quotes
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I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
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We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.
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Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
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People who stand near the water in the darkness are either lovers or poets. Or else ... one of that great gray number who've simply had it -- who throw in their hand and won't play anymore.
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Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.
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Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
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I believe in magic ... There is magic in the creative faculty such as great poets and philosophers conspicuously possess, and equally in the creative chessmaster.
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Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical.
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If for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry.
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O woman! thou wert fashioned to beguile: So have all sages said, all poets sung.
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To know how to say what other people only think, is what makes poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers.
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I think all the poets and artists have always written for peace and love, and it hasn’t changed much in the last two or three thousand years. But we hope.
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...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.
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With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.
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Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
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The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
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What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
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We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
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We must all teach ourselves to be fine, to be poets.
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I think most poets are natural witnesses and were curious about everything.
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There shall be poets! When woman's unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man--hitherto detestable--having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.
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The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.
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And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.
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Poets are band leaders who have failed.
