Beauty Poetry Quotes & Sayings

There comes a period of the imagination to each
a later youth
the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. — Neil Postman

But poetry, romance, love, beauty? These are what we stay alive for! — N.H. Kleinbaum

Pices : Without you I'm nothing,you're my everything
Aquarius : Without you I'm lonely and unpretty,you're my happiness and beauty — Patrick Cruz

Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,
And night devour its flaming hues alway? — Clark Ashton Smith

You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul. — Gabriela Mistral

Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was already a poetic achievement; a philosopher's life was an enactment of his philosophy; and when they were a part of life that way, instead of ignoring each other, philosophy could nourish poetry, poetry express philosophy, and together achieve an admirable persuasiveness. Today beauty no longer acts; and action no longer bothers about being beautiful; and wisdom operates on the sidelines. — Andre Gide

Poetry may appear to be just words, but it is an extension of our lives. It is the music of life and for us to f ind true happiness, we have to immerse ourselves in its beauty. — Abdul Milazi

Focus on beauty, not on fear
dance with stress to let it clear — Debasish Mridha

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down. — Mahmoud Darwish

Who was this girl alone so late at night
in search of a faded cassette illusion to disembowel the clocks of time's intrusion? Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful maniac I've ever met. Our love is a vine of entrails that can follow any coffin anywhere, no matter how deep any gravedigger might travel. — Nicholaus Patnaude

Catch from the board of beauty/ Such careless crumbs as fall. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poetry, is a life long war waged
against ineffable beauty. — Atticus Poetry

There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more - there is action. The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look; it is the embodiment of the sentiment in actual help. — Octavius Winslow

I have no worries even if I die the very next moment, for I am sure that I will be around you even after that! Perhaps as an orphan cloud upon the blue skies, a drop of water falling onto your palms, a leaf of green that capture your vision or an invisible breeze caressing your skin - for I am the beauty of the universe! — Preeth Nambiar

The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. — D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor. — Christopher Caudwell

Time, That Is Pleased to Lengthen out the Day

Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day
For grieving lovers parted or denied,
And pleased to hurry the sweet hours away
From such as lie enchanted side by side,
Is not my kinsman; nay, my feudal foe
Is he that in my childhood was the thief
Of all my mother's beauty, and in woe
My father bowed, and brought our house to grief.
Thus, though he think to touch with hateful frost
Your treasured curls, and your clear forehead line,
And so persuade me from you, he has lost;
Never shall he inherit what was mine.
When Time and all his tricks have done their worst,
Still will I hold you dear, and him accurst. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

My illness was love, though I knew not the smart,
But the beauty of love was the blood of my heart. — John Clare

Though what is 'Romeo and Juliet' after all?" he added after a short pause. "The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all the rest of us. — Anton Chekhov

The source of beauty in a man,
It is humbleness and grace;
Equality is the pearl of a king,
Justice his scepter;
Salvation is his crown. — Stephan Attia

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. — Milan Kundera

A rose lay open in full bloom
and, looking from my garden room,
I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain.
It seemed so fragile,
resting there,
and such a silence filled the air,
the beauty of the moment caused me pain.
"What more?" I thought. "There must be more."
As if in answer then, I saw
one weighty drop that caused my rose to fall.
It trembled, then cascaded down
to earth just staining gentle brown
and, since then, I've felt different.
That's all. — Julie Andrews Edwards

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty. — Fernando Pessoa

GDP doesn't register, as Robert Kennedy put it, "the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate." GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, "except that which makes life worthwhile." Nor does GDP take into account unpaid work, the so-called compassionate economy. — Eric Weiner

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. — Seamus Heaney

It is through beauty, poetry and visionary power that the world will be renewed. — Maria Tatar

People have explored these questions ['Why am I here?', 'What is life about?'] in poems, not that they found their answers, but in reading [poems], I think, you find a certain beauty in the questioning, and that is then poetry. — Gwee Li Sui

Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty. — Alex Lemon

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it's probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it's like to be that lobster in the pot, that's in poetry too. — Dean Young

I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young. — Peter Meinke

I cannot speak truth without poetry, because truth is beauty. — Bryant McGill

Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry ... Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her. — J. Ruth Gendler

I wish I could tell the tale of your beauty as my rough hands caress your face ... — John Geddes

Pascal," said Dr. Meescham, "had it that since it could not be proven whether God existed, one might as well believe that he did, because there was everything to gain by believing and nothing to lose. This is how it is for me. What do I lose if I choose to believe? Nothing!"
"Take this squirrel, for instance. Ulysses. Do I believe he can type poetry? Sure, I do believe it. There is much more beauty in the world if I believe such a thing is possible. — Kate DiCamillo

David furrowed his brow. "I ... I don't understand half of what goes on around me. I don't get jokes or sunsets or poetry, but I know metal." His fingers flexed unconsciously as if he were physically grasping for words. "Beauty was your armor. Fragile stuff, all show. But what's inside you? That's steel. It's brave and unbreakable. And it doesn't need fixing." He drew in a deep breath then awkwardly stepped forward. He took her face in his hands and kissed her.
Genya went regid. I thought she'd push him away. But then she threw her arms around him and kissed him back. Emphatically.
Mal cleared his throat, and Tamar gave a low whistle. I had to bite my lip to stifle a nervous laugh.
They broke apart. David was blushing furiously. Genya's grin was so dazzling it made my heart twist in my chest. — Leigh Bardugo

Today and every day:
I offer the universe my love
I offer the universe my peace
I offer the universe my beauty of hope
I offer the universe my deepest gratitude
for her hospitality and generosity — Debasish Mridha

This is the age of science, of steel -- of speed and the cement road. The age of hard faces and hard highways. Science and steel demand the medium of prose. Speed requires only the look -- the gesture. What need then, for poetry?

Great need!

There are souls, in these noise-tired times, that turn aside into unfrequented lanes, where the deep woods have harbored the fragrances of many a blossoming season. Here the light, filtering through perfect forms, arranges itself in lovely patterns for those who perceive beauty... — Roy J. Cook

And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He Said...

Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love. — Anne Spencer

So you find Miss Mercer beautiful?"
The buzzing in Spencer's head formed the words, "'She walks in beauty like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.'"
"My God, now you're quoting poetry."
Had he said that aloud? Bloody hell. Spencer brandished his empty mug at his brother. "I always quote verse when I'm foxed."
"You must be very foxed to quote that idiot Byron. Or very impressed by Miss Mercer's looks. — Sabrina Jeffries

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell. — Lascelles Abercrombie

A beautiful poem is nothing but a mirror of philosophy through which we can see life's pure beauty. — Debasish Mridha

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before. — Brandi L. Bates

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination. — Azar Nafisi

I believe that Manila can be a reflection of your state of mind. Being a city of extreme contrasts it's easy to see how it can become an intense personal experience. Manila can be chaotic and spiritual, dirty and divine, gritty and gorgeous all at once. If you don't find beauty and poetry here, you will never find it anywhere. — Carlos Celdran

One of the best records I've ever heard. Seriously, maybe top 20 all-time ... I think if Rich Mullins had been given more time here, and if God had blessed his life with love and a wife, if he had the chance to see as much of the relational beauty as he saw of the natural beauty, I think he might have written some songs like the ones we find on BiRDS OF RELOCATiON. And you know that's about the highest praise I can give someone. You will not find a combination of more beautiful poetry, raw honesty, and gorgeous melodies for a long time. — Todd Agnew

Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment. — Saint-John Perse

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

I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn't ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn't it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We'd make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty. (127 — Timothy Schaffert

Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless. — Dejan Stojanovic

it was the kind of moon
that I would want to
send back to my ancestors
and gift to my descendants

so they know that I too,
have been bruised...by beauty. — Sanober Khan

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. — William Shakespeare

The skies bend, the time stops, the lanes move and the fires dance,
It can mean only one thing that I am with you.
You are enigmatic yet so beautiful that I have lost my sense,
You are as immaculate as the unadulterated morning dew
And your beauty leaves me in a mystified trance.
I do not foresee what you and I will be
But I promise to be with you till the rocks keep meeting the sea. — Faraaz Kazi

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not. — Mark Nepo

The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it. — Johnny Depp

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,
Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,
Sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand. — Charles Baudelaire

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

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty. — Robert Hass

To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart. — Aberjhani

In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life. — Jonas Mekas

Love is sacred. Beauty is sacred. Flowers are sacred. Birds are sacred. And sacredness brings the perfume of love and compassion. Therefore love and compassion is the perfume of sacredness. It sounds rather poetic, but ... God IS poetry. — Vasant Lad

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. — Matthew Arnold

The beauty of poetry is that it can mean different things to different people at different times. — Wendy Higgins

Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches. — Goldwin Smith

Gilds the crenelated towers of the churches here and there, Intensifies the hue of flowers makes thy lovely face more fair. — Marguerite De Angeli

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. — Walter Pater

I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun. — Edward Abbey

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

If you love beauty, it's because beauty lives within you. If you love art, it's because you are creative. If it wakes up your heart, a receptor for it already exists within you. Your soul is drawn to the things that will help you unfold your most glorious expression. Give in. — Cynthia Occelli

What is more beautiful than a sea of water with a number of white-winged boats skirting its surface? Poetry and beauty contesting with the wind and the waves! — George Matthew Adams

Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety. — William Carlos Williams

To be a poet is to place pleasure, beauty and sensual delights front and centre, it means having a predilection for debauchery. — Nicole Brossard

I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me. — Jenim Dibie

Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand-in-hand with life; so that the artist's life was already a poetic realisation, the philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unacquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy - and the result was admirably persuasive. Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart. — Andre Gide

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. — Steven Pinker

Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare. — Robert Aris Willmott

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. — Osho

Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities — William T. Vollmann

Their heart grew cold
they let their wings down — Sappho

I don't want to wake up to a beautiful morning, nor I would seek my destiny in sunlit paths. The secret of life is the darkness of it, a void that would pull you deep to where you disappear into your truest self. Alas O world, little you have for an earnest heart that sings the beauty of vibrant life. — Preeth Nambiar

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry. — Blaise Pascal

It's been an adventure just getting out to Saturn, .. Saturn is such an alluring photographic target. It's a joy, really, to be able to take our images and composite them in an artful way, which is one of my cardinal working goals. It's about poetry and beauty and science all mixed together. — Carolyn Porco

we are all like poems.
some of us rhyme. some don't.
some are Pulitzer prizes
some are just scribbles

and yet, we all possess
a special kind of beauty

that can either heal
or cut to the bone

one that can never quite
be fathomed, nor forgotten. — Sanober Khan

It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise. — Charles Baudelaire

The tender spring upon thy tempting lip
Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted:
Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time. — William Shakespeare

First, we think all truth is beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain is good because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex is beautiful even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute is as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature and are woven into the design of life! — Irving Stone

Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note
In me a beauty that was never mine,
How first you knew me in a book I wrote,
How first you loved me for a written line ... — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life. — Philippe Petit

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

People Die ...
Beauty Fades ...
Love Changes ...
And You Will Always Be Alone — L.J.Smith

No doubt, the poetry, overjoyed by swallowing the beverage of passionate thoughts, delights the mind. But she does not realize the sorrows and troubles of the poor. Forget depicting the beauty of passions and present your poetry as a necklace of thought gems to swell the soul. — Manmohan Acharya

Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty. — Robert Gilfillan

For, whom the Muses smile upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable
Lurketh nature veritable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND YOU

When I hold a rose,
I see the soft, velvety petals
and smile, because
tucked between
those precious petals
is a special gift -
the one of a fragrance,
pure and sweet.
When you hold a rose,
you see the thorns
along the stem,
and you frown
because those thorns
can bring you pain
and cause you to bleed.
I see the gift.
You see the tragedy.
More and more
I fear that one of these days
someone will hand me a rose
and all I will see
are thorns.
Talk about tragedy. — Lisa Schroeder

Maketa Groves has a strong, bright lyric gift. Her poems come out of music and are full of music. They bring us the sounds of the streets and the sounds of nature, and make us see once again that they are parts of the same song. She celebrates American lives as they are lived today: the mother scrubbing her kitchen floor at midnight, the drag-queens in the Tenderloin, the homeless woman knitting in the courtyard. This is poetry that relentlessly shows us the beauty in the world, with all its struggles and complexity, and demands that we go out to meet it with open hearts. — Diane Di Prima

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrance of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
— Siegfried Sassoon

Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with the
floating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I'm sad they're gone ... sad and blue. — Nicholaus Patnaude

I am the eye that beholds ... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky ... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love. — Solange Nicole

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