Poetry Proverbs

Sayings about Poetry

Three things that can't be taught: generosity, poetry and a singing voice. ~ Irish Proverb

Growing rice gives you more than poetry will. ~ Japanese Proverb

Poetry moves heaven and earth. ~ Japanese Proverb

Quotations about Poetry

What is poetry but impassioned truth—philosophy in its essence—the spirit of that bright consummate flower, whose root is in our bosoms? ~ Ebenezer Elliott

Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious. ~ Thomas Carlyle

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. ~ Raymond Chandler

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry. ~ Alexander Pope

Poetry should be vital--either stirring our blood by its divine movements or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both is supreme glory, to do either is enduring fame. ~ Augustine Birrell

Poetry, the sister-spirit of music. ~ Mme. le Vert

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. ~ A.W. Hare and J.C. Hare

The pleasure that poetry gives is that of imagining more than is written; the task is divided between the poet and his reader. ~ Alexandre Vinet

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. ~ Oscar Wilde

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. ~ Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls. ~ Voltaire

All that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it. ~ William Hazlitt

Poetry is the overflowing of the Soul. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power. ~ Walter Savage Landor

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~ Robert Graves

[T]he office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly. ~ Frederick W. Robertson

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were. ~ Dr. John Donne

Poetry is indispensable -- if I only knew what for. ~ Jean Cocteau

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~ Khalil Gibran

Bishop Ken styled poetry "thought in blossom." ~ William Winter

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild. ~ Denis Diderot

Poetry is never abandoned, it is only remixed. ~ James Schwartz

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music. ~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is fact given over to imagery. ~ Rod McKuen

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. ~ John Keats

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. ~ Charles Baudelaire

I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. ~ Edith Södergran

Prose, words in their best order. Poetry, the best words in the best order. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its divine origin. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. ~ John Keats

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week. ~ A.W. Hare and J.C. Hare

Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. ~ William Blissett

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason. ~ Samuel Johnson

These are the gloomy comparisons of a disturbed imagination; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration. ~ Junius

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~ Carl Sandburg

I have supped on poetry. ~ Octave Mirbeau,

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. ~ James Tate

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry. ~ Stephen Spender,

Prose--words in their best order;--poetry--the best words in their best order. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. ~ John Cage

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. ~ Carl Sandburg

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject. ~ Matthew Arnold

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~ Novalis

Poetry slips a silk dress over naked prose. ~ James Lendall Basford

Poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own magic hermitage. ~ John Sterling

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. ~ Author Unknown

Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion. ~ William Wordsworth

Poetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other, for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence. ~ Abraham Coles

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought. ~ Honore de Balzac

There can be poetry in the writings of a few men; but it ought to be in the hearts and lives of all. ~ John Sterline

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. ~ William Hazlitt

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -- That is a life.~ T. S. Eliot

Poetry is all nouns and verbs. ~ Marianne Craig Moore

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Poetry should only occupy the idle. ~ Lord Byron

The poetry of the earth is never dead. ~ John Keats

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ~ Yevgeny Yentushenko

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~ Edmund Burke

[Poetry] feeds on the purest substance of the sentiments of the soul. It quenches its thirst with a nectar that has no dregs. ~ Alexandre Vinet

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~ Joseph Joubert

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds. ~ Alphonse de Lamartine

Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in music of language. ~ Paul Chatfield

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument. ~ Joseph Joubert

Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos. ~ I.A. Richards

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages. ~ Alphonse de Lamartine

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all. ~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire; it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. ~ George Sand

Poetry is the breath of beauty. ~ Leigh Hunt

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. ~ Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~ Christopher Fry

The poetry of a given age teaches us less what it has, than what it wants and what it loves. It is a living medal, where the concavities in the die are transformed into convexities on the bronze or gold. ~ Alexandre Vinet

It sometimes seems to me (it is an error, I confess, but one into which I am for ever falling) that poetry is no longer anything more than an imitation of poetry... ~ Alexandre Vinet

A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all poets when we read a poem as well. ~ Thomas Carlyle,

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically. ~ Jean Cocteau

Those are poets who write thoughts as fragrant as flowers, and in as many-colored words. ~ Baroness Barbara Juliane de Krudener

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~ Carl Sandburg

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion. ~ Zona Gale

Poetry is evidently a contagious complaint. ~ Washington Irving

Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us. ~ Joseph Joubert

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman

He who finds elevated and lofty pleasures in the feeling of poetry is a true poet, though he has never composed a line of verse in his entire lifetime. ~ Mme. Armandine Lucile Dupon Dudevant

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. ~ Aristotle