Powerful Poetry Quotes

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful. ~ K'naan

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

Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adore-
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. ~ William Wordsworth

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ... ~ Amy Lowell

We're only lucky enough to see the wonders of nature's canyons because they're gracious enough to show us the places they've been damaged. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding. ~ Immanuel Kant

Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. Sexual energy Freud calls it; the capital of desire I call it; it pays for both mental and physical expenditure. ~ Sylvia Ashton-Warner

For you
i have saved poems
under my skin. ~ Sanober Khan

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology. ~ Mary Doria Russell

I came up with a new reason
To write your name today
I plagiarized each letter
From a love note you wrote me.
The scent of ink was sacred to me
In that relapsed moment…
For a minute I could pretend
The paper reminded me of your skin;
I could pretend the glimmering ink
Was the moonlit lake
Of our summer night.
But the pretending crumpled with paper
And I threw us into the trash can
For the bridge between us is long burned
And it's time I accepted that. ~ Justin Wetch

I will stay…
As long as you're holding my hands
I will forgive…
As long as you're willing to change
I will fight…
As long as you stand with me
I will support…
As long as you do the same
I will stay…
As long as you need 'us'
I will stay,
I will forgive,
I will fight,
I will support,
I will…
As long as you do the same. ~ Jyoti Patel

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't. ~ Dorianne Laux

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil. ~ Michel De Montaigne

November the seventh
The last
Faint cricket ~ Jack Kerouac

It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipment
To be counted and signed for.
On occasion some of us break down,
And those parts which can't be salvaged
Are replaced with other GI parts, that's all. ~ Rolando Hinojosa

The hell in your soul will always find heaven in mine. ~ Jenim Dibie

You will find
that most of life's
toughest
and more existential
questions
can be solved
or indefinitely postponed
by spending more time
around the people you love. ~ Atticus Poetry

One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time. ~ Maria Shriver

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. ~ Don DeLillo

When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree. (...) And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about. ~ Peter S. Beagle

It's difficult to be the best version of yourself all the time. But perhaps life isn't about that. You don't have to always be in a good mood; you don't have to always be sociable or productive. It's about how much you try, even when it feels like life keeps flipping upside down. ~ Courtney Peppernell

Poetry and painting are rooted in the same law,
The work of heaven and of the first cause. ~ Su Shi

The Congress is pretty powerful if it wants to be. ~ Newt Gingrich

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy. ~ Anne Waldman

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Five years from the date of the attack that changed our world, we've come back to remember the valor of those we lost-those who innocently went to work that day and the brave souls who went in after them. We have also come to be ever mindful of the courage of those who grieve for them, and the light that still lives in their hearts. ~ Rudy Giuliani

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I brought out the most powerful tool I had in my arsenal. "If you resist," I said into Reyes's ear, "I'll be forced to Taser you."
He looked at what I had in my hand. "That's a phone."
"I have an app. You'll probably experience nerve damage. Slight memory loss. ~ Darynda Jones

What [others] most need is to see in you a reflection of what God is like and of the transforming power of the Gospel. Your life can create hunger and thirst for God in others' lives and can be a powerful instrument in the hand of the Holy Spirit to draw their hearts to Christ. ~ Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Words can be powerful allies. Or enemies ~ Yasmine Galenorn

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line. ~ Langston Hughes

Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

You ask me to write you a poem,
I pen you an empty ocean,
You run away.
You ask me who I am,
I paint you a breaking sky,
You weep in the rain. ~ Jenim Dibie

History repeats itself. Someone says this.
History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of,
I know history. There are many names in history ... but none of them are ours. ~ Richard Siken

I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his "Midsummer Night's Dream" Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age then. But what was I going to do? ~ Anthony Burgess

The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal. ~ Sally Odgers

you wouldn't let me
love both of us
at the same time ~ Rudy Francisco

There is a higher more powerful part of you. Your higher self will come through your intuition, coincidences and synchronicity of all kinds. ~ James Van Praagh

If nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, nothing is more harmful than an idea which is manipulated by motivated men. Rogues and crooks have ideas. So do ordinary folks. But intellectuals are meant to be a breed apart for the same reason rocks aren't gems. ~ Mohammad Badrul Ahsan

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. ~ Conrad Aiken

Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force ... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.. ~ William James

Addiction, that is, negative addiction, is the third, and in terms of pain, essentially successful choice in the series of choices made by people who are unable to find sufficient love and worth. Each choice - from the initial decision to give up trying to find love or worth, the second choice to take on one or more symptoms, and the final choice of becoming addicted - is a pain-reducing step. The reason addiction is powerful and difficult to break is that it alone of all the choices consistently both completely relieves the pain of failure, and provides an intensely pleasurable experience. ~ William Glasser

Song of myself
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. ~ Walt Whitman

Every Song
Every song
is the remains
of love.
Every light
the remains
of time.
A knot
of time.
And every sigh
the remains
of a cry. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

i
like a fool
stayed
waiting for the day
you
would do something different ~ Renaada Williams