Poetry Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

An art is a poetry but only a few can read it. — Debasish Mridha

Life is a never-ending poetry of love. — Debasish Mridha

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

The weight of wait. — Cameron Conaway

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

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face — Ian Fleming

The fakirs always throng the sea-shore
To find meaning in the chaos
And then they too become melancholy
Feeling nothing but their naked toes. — Avijeet Das

The statement 'There is nothing more American than an Indian' happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss. — Charles Slagle

A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape. — Dejan Stojanovic

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile? — Aristotle.

The history of man is a must read poetry. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Oracle of Delphi:
In my deep mystery I breathe
your fragrance swirling in
your odourless soul
I return your mystery
revealing your destiny deep in
the seed of your God Self — Ramon Ravenswood

Whoever challenges freaks should notice
that in the method he does not mature into a beast. — Santosh Kalwar

I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too. — John Stuart Mill

There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle. — Dejan Stojanovic

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

Do not look too far for you will see nothing. — Dejan Stojanovic

Nothingness
... there in this place
where nothingness takes
but for the glimmer
a steadfast shimmer
all would be consumed ... — Muse

[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots. — Stephan Delbos

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls. — Aberjhani

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another. — Aberjhani

Thoughts
thoughts. Are they not mine?
I think, I write, I type.
Thoughts. Are they wise?
Let truth be told in words, compiled together, create a page, a book.
Thoughts. Are they master piece?
Is it a prize winner? ... An Alfred Nobel?
Thoughts. Are they not mine?
Gift of God?
they are not mine. — Edna Stewart

Material creation begins in a tiny corner of a large island called imagination. — Stella Mowen

Lifes like a painters palette, just when you've got everything worked out the colours change — Benny Bellamacina

Poetry is more than a form of art. It's a vibration and a pulsing heart. Whether it's sour or whether it's sweet. It can give you strength no one can defeat — Stanley Victor Paskavich

The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane. — F.K. Preston

A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded ... He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him. — Oscar Wilde

What property is left to dreamers when every idea has been tamed and conquered? What about the poet who dreams of embracing the night sky? It's utterly impossible. And yet the thought of it sparks song and dance, poetry and philosophy. — Roshani Chokshi

Absolute equals nothingness. — Dejan Stojanovic

I die a little everyday, in trying to revive what I lost yesterday! — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it. — Charles Baudelaire

Thus it is, we sow motions of hatred out of our own impoverished understanding of love. Yet we do so in the name of love. The perplexing precipice of the illusory infirmity. — Steven Storm

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards. — Dejan Stojanovic

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy. — Joseph Alexander Leighton

Only through religion can logic develop into philosophy, only from this source stems that which makes philosophy more than science. And without religion we will have only novels, or the triviality today called belles lettres instead of an eternally rich and infinite poetry. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

Like contemporary poetry , philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished. — Samuel R. Delany

Philosophy deals in the abstract and the universal, but not in the particular. History deals only in the particular, not with general principles. Poetry deals with both, illustrating universal principles with particular examples or embodiments of those principles:
Now doth the peerless poet perform both: for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done; so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example.
Another advantage poetry has over philosophy is greater clarity:
the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher.
Essentially, poetry shows history more brilliantly than history, and explains philosophy more cogently than philosophy. — Philip Sidney

each morning we're born again
of yesterday nothing remains
what's left began today — Anselm Hollo

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert? — Dejan Stojanovic

After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I'd experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she'd handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world. — Paul Kalanithi

Cheapen words and they'll cheapen you — Benny Bellamacina

The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger. — Peter Sloterdijk

Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn't live off fame, but rather deeds. — Dejan Stojanovic

There can be no law of nature, no science,
No aberrant infliction of human will
That unchained the soul cannot conquer,
Simply sweep away, should it chose to. — Scott Hastie

After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare? — Dejan Stojanovic

Poetry is an art of expressing the unknown music of our inner feelings and emotions in our known language. — Debasish Mridha

Every rose has poetry in her heart and is eager to tell you when you are in love. — Debasish Mridha

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

He thought others were small; that was his greatness. — Dejan Stojanovic

Inhale sky. Exhale stars. — Vytautaseneyevich

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as
my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories
fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. — Wislawa Szymborska

God is busy and has no time for you. — Dejan Stojanovic

I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled ... In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate. — Katherine Anne Porter

Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence. — Dejan Stojanovic

How much does he lack himself who must have many things? — Sen No Rikyu

The universe is God's son. — Dejan Stojanovic

A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words. — Debasish Mridha

In the lie of truth lies the truth. — Dejan Stojanovic

Teaching others, he corrected himself. — Dejan Stojanovic

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry. — M. Fethullah Gulen

To get lost, all you need is poetry. — Debasish Mridha

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and there are thousands like me - you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. — Virginia Woolf

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge. — Dejan Stojanovic

No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I want to enjoy the languor of just living, recognizing, acknowledging, taking it in, sort of amplifying it in some way. [Photography] is a great medium for that. It happens in an instant, but it gives you hours or days of time to reflect on things. It's a beautiful system, this game of photography, to see in an instant and go back and think about later on. It's pure philosophy. And poetry. — Joel Meyerowitz

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

Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute. — Dejan Stojanovic

Hope without love is hopeless. — Dejan Stojanovic

Darkness does not age; nothing is always nothing — Dejan Stojanovic

Your life is a poetry, it just needs some interpretation. — Debasish Mridha

We need knew knights, but without swords. — Dejan Stojanovic

A thing is never untold, It is always misperceived. — Nishikant

Real poetry is about life as it is lived by instinct, not by philosophy. — Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

ERRORS ARE WHAT MAKE US HUMAN. PLOT TWIST: I'M A HORSE. — Amy King

Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

The poet ... is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs ... the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds. — Jacques Derrida

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

History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.
from Past Present and Future are One — Aberjhani

Poetry of the universe is written with flowers and the lights of love on a canvas we call earth. — Debasish Mridha

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting. — Dejan Stojanovic

So it became,
the law of universe,
to have the,
profoundest,
of the words,
cloaked in the,
darkest of the masks. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets? — Michel De Montaigne

Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I see the life with your sight,
O" the love; you're my light. — Debasish Mridha

Friendship is a poetry of life that is written in two hearts. — Debasish Mridha

How would it alter Juliet's love perception to learn the sea is but a rounded jug of water? Would her sensuous analogy turned simple simile unveil to her the limits of herself? Or would she forget the ocean, that deplorable casket, and turn on the true bottomless tumbler, the only running tap: the sky? It may have lost the title 'heavens' when its gods were dethroned, but its infinity reigns. So long as you walk, it reigns. So long as I talk and you listen, there's a voice and ears to keep it active, moving, and reason to say: look! infinity lives. And when we and the other consciousnesses pass, though it in part dies with us, still it reigns. It will, in a sense, plod on, like a lifeless coffin through its own space, sails set for nothing, unstoppable when trailing its fabric. — Richard Ronald Allan

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy. — Jonathan Haidt

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? — Henry David Thoreau

In the essence of truth lies deceit. — Dejan Stojanovic

The whispers inside the red wheelbarrow's dew. — Cameron Conaway

Love life, Live Love — Benny Bellamacina

If you are good, they say you are weak. — Dejan Stojanovic

The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

- "Auguries of Innocence — William Blake

Does poetry - or language or philosophy or music or architecture, even that of our temples - really need to dance to the same tune as our political befiefs or our religious convictions? Is the strict harmony of our cultural identities a virtue to be valued above others that may come from the accommodation of contradictions? — Maria Rosa Menocal

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit. — Dejan Stojanovic