"Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that."
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Poetry quotes
Poetry
987 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside poetry — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Poetry quotes (page 3 of 50)
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"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice."
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"Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event."
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"Poetry is an act of peace."
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"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."
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"The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system."
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"The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."
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"When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum."
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"Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read."
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"They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom."
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"Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection."
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"Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet."
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"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
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"Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild."
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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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"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
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"Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science."
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"A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years."
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"You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit."
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"Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young."
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