Poetry Quotes
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Let yourself becoming living poetry
Rumi
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In order for poetry to exist there has to be not-poetry to contrast it with.
Elaine Equi
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Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.
Diane Ackerman
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The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.
John Ruskin
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
Will Durant
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Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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The real thing creates its own poetry.
Anzia Yezierska
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At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
Satyajit Ray
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I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
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Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
Stephen Sondheim
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For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know; 'Tis only infinite below.
Jonathan Swift
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I have just discovered the beautiful poetry of Soren Ulrik Thomsen. Danish is not the strongest of languages, but he uses it very well.
Sidse Babett Knudsen
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Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.
Ben Lerner
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Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
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If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
Norman MacCaig
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I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.
Alice Oswald
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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
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How they had dreamed together, he and she... how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived for a while in the very heart of poetry.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.
Paul Engle
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Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.
Northrop Frye
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History is the new poetry.
Thomas Carlyle
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Whatever your life's pursuit -- art, poetry, sculpture, music, whatever your occupation may be -- you can be as spiritual as clergy, always living a life of praise.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
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Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.
Helen Keller