Famous Poets Quotes

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. ~ Aberjhani

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

Your future may hinge
on your ability
to disconnect yourself
with the world
and connect with your soul. ~ Bhuwan Thapaliya

There are some people who cannot help giving. Why? Because they experience a real psychological pleasure in doing so. They don't do it with an eye to their own advantage, they do it on the quiet; they detest doing it openly because that would take away some of the satisfaction. They do it in secret, with quick trembling hands, their breasts rocked by a spiritual well being which they do not themselves understand. ~ Knut Hamsun

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

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. ~ Donald Hall

The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi's poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal. ~ Aberjhani

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves. ~ W. H. Auden

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ~ Emily Dickinson

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives. ~ Aberjhani

This is what our love is––a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds. ~ Aberjhani

A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable. ~ Aberjhani

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these. ~ T. S. Eliot

a poem is never finished, only abandoned, ~ Clive James

A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweller, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more. ~ Horace Walpole

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me. ~ Sigmund Freud

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. ~ Aberjhani

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth. ~ Aberjhani

If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience ... would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love? ~ Aberjhani

In a 1972 story titled "The Big Space Fuck," Kurt Vonnegut names his spaceship with "eight hundred pounds of freeze-dried jizzum in its nose" the Arthur C. Clarke, "in honor of a famous space pioneer." Its mission is to impregnate the Andromeda Galaxy. ~ Michael Benson

give me
a pillow of strong
ever-dependable shoulders
that i can bury my head in. ~ Sanober Khan

Ancient poets and sages have called the earth the mother of all things. They could hardly have chosen a more attractive name, or one that was more appropriate. From her lap springs everything that possesses life and motion, everything that flourishes, fades, and has its fated day, and she tirelessly provides material for the countless varied bodies that are created
and then abandoned
by the life force in its unending, hidden progress through nature. ~ Jonas Hallgrimsson

Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor's famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico's. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf's, Tiffany's. ~ Melanie Benjamin

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them. ~ Gregory Orr

Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare. ~ Joseph Campbell

I'm profoundly changed. There's a bittersweet emotion that I feel from playing this role ... I want the world to be different because I was here. However lofty or crazy or delusional that may sound, I want people's lives to be better because I was here. ~ Will Smith

This is a great wedding. I like weddings." "It is a good one, isn't it?" she agreed. "But it was always going to be--Emma so efficient." "Isn't she," he said. "I like weddings." Lulu said nothing. "Weddings," he said after a moment. "Funny things, but I like them." Lulu stopped dancing and drew back to look up into his eyes. "If you say that one more time," she said levelly, "I won't take you to the Cheddar cheese shop." "Sorry," he said quickly "I like funerals, too, if that's any help? We do marvelous ones in Ireland, we're famous for them. ~ Gabrielle Donnelly

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets. ~ W. H. Auden

Cinema is a language. It can say things - big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I'm not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you've got time and sequences. You've got dialogue. You've got music. You've got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can't be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium. For me, it's so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. Its not just words or music-it's a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn't exist before. It's telling stories. It's devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that's what cinema can do. ~ David Lynch

Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Everybody want famous, like me to be a famous director. ~ Andrew Lau

promenade concert n. BRITISH a concert of classical music at which a part of the audience stands in an area without seating, for which tickets are sold at a reduced price. The most famous series of such concerts is the annual BBC Promenade Concerts (known as the Proms), instituted by Sir Henry Wood in 1895. ~ Catherine Soanes

No matter how famous the victim, no matter how powerful the advocates, it simply isn't always possible to control the conduct of other people. ~ Gavin De Becker

[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight. ~ Joseph Campbell

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. ~ W.B.Yeats

A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages has sent poets, popes, kings and fools to the junk heap. ~ Jim Tully

Is that a bad thing? I asked, not entirely sure how I felt about the situation. Had it been someone other than Paige, I would have thought they were a spoiled brat getting whatever they wanted because they were famous. And it would have annoyed the living shit out of me. But since it was Paige, I didn't feel as irritated. Which made me a hypocritical dick who was okay with double standards. I should make a T-shirt. ~ J. Sterling

She was one of those exceptional children who do still spend time outside, in solitude. In her case nature represented beauty - and refuge. "It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. I mean, it's polluted, but not as much as the city air. For me, it's completely different there," she said. "It's like you're free when you go out there. It's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad - and then, just with the peacefulness, I'm better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn't even know why."
The she described her special part of the woods.
"I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day."
The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened.
"And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me. ~ Richard Louv

Poets are band leaders who have failed. ~ Ayi Kwei Armah

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever. ~ Stan Brakhage

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned. ~ Richard Russo

You asked a question about Martin Luther King.... All that stuff about "the dream" means nothing to the kids I know.... He died in vain. He was famous and he lived and gave his speeches and he died and now he's gone. But we're still here. Don't tell students in this school about "the dream." Go and look into a toilet here if you would like to know what life is like for students in this city.
-a student at East St. Louis High School, 1990 ~ Jennifer L. Hochschild

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative ... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions. ~ Kiki Smith

Other times I just lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, imagining the kind of life I want to have when I get older. I picture myself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, climbing pyramids in Egypt, dancing in the streets in Spain, riding in a boat in Venice, and walking on the Great Wall of China. In these dreams, I'm a famous writer who wears flamboyant scarves and travels all around the world, meeting fascinating people. No one tells me what to do. I go wherever I want and do whatever I please. ~ Erika L. Sánchez

I signed a deal with Satan because I wanted to get famous. Then I forgot I had a deal with Satan and then I got really famous. ~ Roseanne Barr

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. ~ Elizabeth Charles

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets. ~ Ezra Pound

Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're dead'. ~ Mary Beard

Researched Heinrich Fuchs. There were a lot of Fuchs in Splugen. Splugen was full of dumb Fuchs. The Swiss are famous for maintaining neutrality, except, apparently, when it comes to shooting at monstrous bugs with someone else's sperm. ~ Andrew Smith

The men were famous once. Some of them still are. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and Brooks had brought them together, 24 summers before. He had picked them and provoked them and pushed them, sometimes irritating them and often infuriating them by his hardness and his aloofness, his scathing rebukes and his unrelenting mind games. ~ Wayne Coffey

In the time you will live, there will be heroes around. Simple men, honest men who work two jobs, go to school, raise a family, and serve our God. An older couple who have the courage to seek out the truth while enduring the scorn and ridicule of their children and friends. A young man, a special spirit, who will take on a body that is deformed- and yet you will never see hime unhappy or without a smile on his face. A young mother who will care for a daughter while she suffers a painful death, and yet never doubt or loose faith that her Father loves them both.
In your worl famous people will be hard to find. But you will be surrounded by heroes, you will meet them everyday. They will be the simple people who struggle but never give up, those who strive to be happy despite the cares of the physical world, those who dream of the day when they will find the truth, those who search for understanding as to why they were born, why there is pain, or what it all means, and yet continure to endure, knowing in their soul, somewhere deep inside, that there has to be an answer.
These are the heroes that our Father needs down on earth. And you will be a hero. We already know that. ~ Chris Stewart

When actors get a bad name for diva behavior - I've never seen it. Because my experience with people who are really famous actors is that they work really hard. ~ Hayley Atwell

Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way. ~ Julian Barnes