Poetry Art Quotes

POETRY HAS A PEPTIC PRESENCE. PRESENTLY. ~ Amy King

You take a word,
you stitch it to another word,
with threads of your soul.
It's called poetry. ~ Jenim Dibie

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry. ~ Patti Smith

WORDS SHLD BE FREE. RELEASE THEM FROM THEIR SENTENCES. ~ Amy King

I paint the darkness and the silence,
You see them as stars and poetry. ~ Jenim Dibie

I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist. ~ Philippe Petit

Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I am the author of my Life and Lovestory,
I wrote it in poetry ~ Patrick Cruz

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry. ~ Erik Satie

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*
is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.
To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry. ~ Laura Riding

IT'S NOT THE HONEY WHISKEY IN A FRIDAY NIGHT - IT'S THE MANIC SHOW OF POETRY TWEETS THAT TURNS ME ON. ~ Amy King

Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away. ~ Erik Naggum

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully. ~ William C. Bryant

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry. ~ Lynda Barry

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry ~ Krista Tippett

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry. ~ John Drinkwater

Poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry. ~ John Hollander

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: 'You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest. ~ Ronald Rolheiser

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry. ~ Matthea Harvey

HER BARBED-WIRE SMILE
LIFTED YOU TO HEAVEN
BUT I HAVE TO ASK
DID GOD LOOK LIKE HER VOICE ~ Amy King

To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry. ~ Alexander Calder

SOME PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE. GET USED TO IT. QUESTION MARK. ~ Amy King

DESPITE THE INVENTION OF TIME MACHINES, WE KEEP BEING LINEAR. ~ Amy King

POETRY SHAPES MY GENDER. ~ Amy King

YOU SAY "POET" LIKE THAT MEANS SOMETHING. ~ Amy King

You cannot look into a cradle and read the secret message traced by a divine hand and wrapped up in that bit of clay, and more than you can see the North Star in the magnetic needle. God has loaded the needle of that young life so it will point to the star which presides over poetry, art, law, medicine, or whatever your own pet calling is, until you have wasted years precious life, yet, when once free, the needle flies back to its own star. ~ Orison Swett Marden

There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depends heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood. ~ Paul Lockhart

We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word "chaos" means "gaping void" or "yawning emptiness." The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema. ~ Werner Herzog

Music, When Soft Voices Die

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

STUFF POETS STILL LIKE: POETRY ~ Amy King

I WISH YOU ALL THE REALITY YOU COULD EVER WANT. HANDLE. WANT. ~ Amy King

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite. ~ John Keats

Dancing is very like poetry. ~ Martha Graham

The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act. ~ Amiri Baraka

THE AMPUTATED HEART
BEATS HARDER ~ Amy King

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry. ~ Aberjhani

I do not trust the truth. It shifts into reality. ~ Christina Strigas

Personality is everything in art and poetry. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are no lungs like the ones that breathe poetry. ~ D. Antoinette Foy

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry. ~ A.E. Housman

History after all is the true poetry. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it. ~ Hannah Arendt

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. ~ Samuel Johnson

Art is the heart's explosion on the world. Music. Dance. Poetry. Art on cars, on walls, on our skins. There is probably no more powerful force for change in this uncertain and crisis-ridden world than young people and their art. It is the consciousness of the world breaking away from the strangle grip of an archaic social order. ~ Luis J Rodriguez

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry. ~ William Empson

Know everything. Say nothing. ~ Luhraw

DJ-ing itself is not just about playing songs. The art of DJ-ing is presenting new songs to the crowd that they haven't heard before and creating a party vibe that's different than just listening to anybody's playlist. It's the only way to truly be big and respected in your craft. ~ TyDi

When God holds the Crayons you can expect a masterpiece. ~ Toni Sorenson

I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces - a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast - could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second. ~ J.D. Salinger

Over the years, Gwen had found there were two kinds of men. Men who made eating a woman an art form because they were average - or barely - in size so they had to compensate. And men who were hung like horses but felt that nine-incher somehow exempted them from one of her favorite forms of entertainment.
Yet somehow that Irish luck that had kept Gwen alive all these years deigned to reward on her the highest blessing a woman could hope for. A well-hung man who loved to give his woman head. ~ Shelly Laurenston

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. ~ Jerzy Kosinski

Eyes sharp as can-openers
pried open heavy secrets. ~ Yehuda Amichai

Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television. ~ Roger Ebert

A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman. ~ Jerry Saltz

He doesn't believe in talking too much about art, especially while you're looking at it. The pressure to appreciate is the great enemy of actual enjoyment. Most people don't know what they like because they feel obligated to like so many different things. They feel they're supposed to be overwhelmed, so instead of looking, they spend their time thinking up something to say, something intelligent, or at least clever. ~ Robert Hellenga

The function of art is to free the spirit of man and to invigorate and enlarge his vision. ~ Katherine Sophie Dreier

The morality of art is in its very beauty. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Yeah, I can't separate the art from the music and the music from the art. I think that stems from going to school for film first, and kind of stumbling onto music as my career. ~ Karen O

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching. ~ Sontag, Susan

When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry. ~ Mary Szybist

The term 'celebrity memoir' has gotten such a bad name now, but there used to be a little bit of an art form to it. ~ Rob Lowe

How it hurts to see you
Achingly beyond my craving touch!

Perhaps, that's the agony
Of a bird with a broken wing
The world seemingly at her feet
Yet not;
And nary a song to sing ~ Mona Soorma

love should taste like
cotton candy−pink
and sickeningly sweet. sticky
on your teeth, a hunger
that grows with each bite,
it should make you feel
full yet also so light. but
when love tastes sour,
does that mean i did not
eat it right? ~ Mecca-Amirah Jackson

Falling in love was easy-when romantic attraction was combined with hungry, unsated desire, they formed a glamorous, glittering bauble as fragile as it was alluring, a bauble that could shatter as soon as it was grasped.
Tenderness was a different story. It had staying power and the promise of a future. ~ Robyn Donald

My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes. ~ Wanda Lea Brayton

What the great mentor is always looking for is a person who is willing to tap his genius, to put it through the refiner's fire, to do the hard work to develop it. Indeed, mentoring is the medieval art of alchemy-turning plain old human steel into hearts and minds of gold. ~ Oliver DeMille

Father, R.I.P., Sums Me Up at Twenty-Three
She has no head for politics,
craves good jewelry, trusts too readily,
marries too early. Then
one by one she sends away her friends
and stands apart, smug sapphire,
her answer to everything a slender
zero, a silent shrug
and every day
still hears me say she'll never be pretty.
Instead she reads novels, instead her belt
matches her shoes. She is master
of the condolence letter, and knows
how to please a man with her mouth:
Good. Nose too large, eyes too closely set,
hair not glorious blonde, not her mother's red,
nor the glossy black her younger sister has,
the little raven I loved best. ~ Deborah Garrison

If I were a 13-year-old and I wanted to create subversive art, I wouldn't go out and buy an electric guitar. I'd get myself a personal computer. ~ Thomas Dolby

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times. ~ Wade Davis

Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer's block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I'm projecting here. ~ Nick Cave

The biggest mistake that parents make, is believing that their assigned task in life is to teach their children and to guide them in every situation of their children's lives. The truth is that it is the task of parents to both learn from their children and to guide them as well. Parenting is a relationship that goes both ways, from the moment your child is born, you learn from that person, and in fact, your lessons begin long before your child's lessons do. Later on, when you've learned a great deal already, then they begin to learn from you. Throughout our lives, it is a give-and-take relationship, in many ways. Our assigned task is to learn from our children, and to guide and teach them. Their assigned task is to learn from us, and also to teach us. ~ C. JoyBell C.

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind
or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean
except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down. ~ Julian Barnes

For the Wife Beater's Wife

With blue irises her face is blossomed. Blue
Circling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks.
The long bone of her jaw untracked
She hides in our kitchen.
He sleeps it off next door.

Her chicken legs tucked under her
She's frantic with lies, animated
Before the swirling smoke.
On her cigarette she leaves red prints, red
Like a cut on the white cup.
Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her.
She's cold,
She brings the cold in with her.

In our kitchen she hides.
He sleeps it off next door, his great
Belly heaving with booze.
Again and again she tells the story
As if the details ever changed,
As if blows to the face were somehow
Different beating to beating.

We reach for her but can't help.
She retreats into her cold love of him
And looks across the table at us
As if across a sea.
Next door he claws out of sleep.
She says she thinks she'll do something
After all, with her hair tonight. ~ Bruce Weigl

We are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecue
we are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted
we are
an unwanted
burning
as we sizzle and fry
to the bone
the coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneath
us
and
above the sky is an open hand
and
the words of wise men are useless
it's not a nice world, a nice world it's
not ... ~ Charles Bukowski

To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another. ~ Benjamin Jowett

It's because the idea of what's cool is different. When you talk to a girl who goes to regular school, what's cool is whether or not you've been to jail, or if you have a car. If you talk to a girl who goes to art school, what's cool to her is if you do art projects on the weekend with your dad, if you can build something - out-of-the-norm stuff. ~ Anthony Mackie

Historians, and even common sense, may inform us, that, however specious these ideas of perfect equality may seem, they are really, at bottom, impracticable; and were they not so, would be extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community. The most rigorous inquisition too is requisite to watch every inequality on its first appearance; and the most severe jurisdiction, to punish and redress it. But besides, that so much authority must soon degenerate into tyranny, and be exerted with great partialities; who can possibly be possessed of it, in such a situation as is here supposed? Perfect equality of possessions, destroying all subordination, weakens extremely the authority of magistracy, and must reduce all power nearly to a level, as well as property.
We may conclude, therefore, that in order to establish laws for the regulation of property, we must be acquainted with the nature and situation of man; must reject appearances, which may be false, though specious; and must search for those rules, which are, on the whole, most useful and beneficial. ~ David Hume

The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

He who fights with guns and knives is a coward! For how easy is it to kill with the single pull of a trigger? And how does human flesh stand to a sharpened metal? Even an idiot can kill with a gun and a knife! A man needs no courage at all to stand behind these things that make him feel invincible and bigger than he ever will be! I don't say that no one should fight! Because battles must be fought, and wars will always be won! But let those who fight, fight with bare hands! The measure of true strength! With his hands and feet and nothing but! The country with truly strong men is able to have soldiers that need not a knife, that need no guns! And if you can soar even higher than that; fight with your pens! Let us all write! And see the substance of the man through his philosophies and through his beliefs! And let one philosophy outdo another! Let one belief outlast another! And let this be how we determine the outcome of a war! ~ C. JoyBell C.

If it's good art, it's good. ~ Kenneth Branagh

Comedians don't have a monopoly on suffering. But creative people are sometimes fortunate enough to be able to incorporate their most traumatic experiences into their art. ~ Matt Lucas