Well Known Poetry Quotes & Sayings

And she smiles and she utters unearthly things and she utters not in any known language, in stars and pain, pulque she says I am devouring time and the earth — Carole Maso

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum
however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology
he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him ... (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124). — W.B.Yeats

Love as a passion - it is our European specialty - must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Shall that be shut to man, which to the beast
Is open? or will God incense his ire
For such a petty trespass? and not praise
Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain
Of death denounced, whatever thing death be,
Deterred not from achieving what might lead
To happier life, knowledge of good and evil;
Of good, how just? of evil, if what is evil
Be real, why not known, since easier shunned?
God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just;
Not just, not God: not feared then, nor obeyed:
Your fear itself of death removes the fear.
Why then was this forbid? Why, but to awe;
Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant,
His worshippers? He knows that in the day
Ye eat thereof, your eyes, that seem so clear,
Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
Opened and cleared, and ye shall be as gods,
Knowing both good and evil, as they know. — John Milton

Cairn Stone
This is the rock he lifted
to lay upon a cairn
in a high place.
This rock, warmed by the near sun,
felt right, somehow, in his hand.
He decided to carry it down
to his mother, who lay in bed,
recovering.
It is so easy to please
a mother. Just to think of her
for a moment, from a high place,
and to carry that thought to her
in the form of a stone. — Claudia Putnam

There is a Day
There's always a day
when I can't believe what was there.
There's always that day
when I didn't understand how to bear.
There's never a day
where I stood in the crowd.
There's never that day
where I knew He was Proud.
There is a day
where I can be alone.
There is that day
where I shall make it known. — Isabel Aanya Leigh

One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about — May Sarton

It was quite a sad thing,
the way I watched you sleep like nothing could go wrong and I did not want to harm it, I did not want to blur it, but how could I not
when everything I've ever known has slowly gone away. — Charlotte Eriksson

If this is how it's going to be -you getting all broody and distracted every time you fall in lust with somebody -well, I haven't the stomach for it. I won't put up with it, not for a dukedom. Not for three dukedoms. I deserve better than the role of a quietly accepting wife. I'm an interesting woman. I read. I have opinions. I appreciate poetry. I have a sense of humor."
"I know all that. I've always known."
"I deserve to be loved, truly loved -mind, body and soul. And in case you haven't noticed, there's a line of men ready to give me all that. Why on earth should I settle for a man who can't give me anything but friendship. Why should I settle for you? — Loretta Chase

A magical portal opened inside my mind and conducted me into an astonishing world ... Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of Cretan, but of every man ... that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. — Nikos Kazantzakis

I

Oh, blessed my beloved homeland,

What you were once so grand dreaded...

Struggling by faith and sword

Thy sons gave their lives for you.

How many dreams were born from nothing,

How much grandeur and glory now regarded,

Since the County to Luiz Vaz and his beloved,

This hero, whose immortal fame is known. — Jose Braz Pereira Da Cruz

The madder I get the more I'm a bore;
Don't go - I'll explain what I'm boring you for.
I've been known to discourse to myself by the sea,
On how boring it is being as boring as me.
And if - from politeness - some interest you feign,
Then I may make an effort and bore you again.
But usually my audiences tend to disperse,
So I sit down and bore myself writing a verse. — Patrick Woodroffe

Had I known, I would not have left you,
alone beneath those stars,
on the night when I last saw you,
not knowing it was the last. — Lang Leav

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,
Your mother, your sister, or your brother?
I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
Your friends?
Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.
Your country?
I do not know in what latitude it lies.
Beauty?
I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.
Gold?
I hate it as you hate God.
Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there
Up there the wonderful clouds! — Charles Baudelaire

The whole party followed, with the exception of Scythrop, who threw himself into his arm-chair, crossed his left foot over his right knee, placed the hollow of his left hand on the interior ancle of his left leg, rested his right elbow on the elbow of the chair, placed the ball of his right thumb against his right temple, curved the forefinger along the upper part of his forehead, rested the point of the middle finger on the bridge of his nose, and the points of the two others on the lower part of the palm, fixed his eyes intently on the veins in the back of his left hand, and sat in this position like the immoveable Theseus, who, as is well known to many who have not been at college, and to some few who have, sedet, oeternumque sedebit. We hope the admirers of the minitiae in poetry and romance will appreciate this accurate description of a pensive attitude. — Thomas Love Peacock

i have known you
since the beginning
of time

the one
i have loved always
in spirit.

only just discovered
in person. — Sanober Khan

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth
penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. — Joseph Campbell

Pierre-Jean Jouve writes: "poetry is a soul inaugurating form". The soul inaugurates. Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity. Even if the "form" was already well-known, previously discovered, carved from "commonplaces", before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it. — Gaston Bachelard