Poet Quotations | Page 4

Kahlil Gibran was an inspiring author, artist and poet whose works have spoken to millions of people from all backgrounds in dozens of languages around the world. Habitat for Humanity itself seeks to embody many of the ideals Gibran embraced and to be similarly universal in its work to build decent housing with families from all races, religions and languages. We are deeply honored to be recognized by the Arab American Institute Foundation with the Kahlil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award.

It always surprises me when people say that the realm of the lyric is the personal, and the personal is not political. I just don't know how we can get to 2014 and say that with a straight face. When you think of a poet like Yeats, how can you say politics is not in the poem? When you think of Milosz, how can you say politics is not in the poem?

It is "lifestyle" journalism the way Chaucer first invented it, and the Times, onto a good thing, is uninhibitedly publishing articles on the passing of a cuckolded poet, a rock promoter strangely addicted to collecting orangutans and an Italian writer striving "to avoid becoming a bore.

LAUREATE, adj. Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral. Of all incumbents of that high office, Robert Southey had the most notable knack at drugging the Samson of public joy and cutting his hair to the quick; and he had an artistic color-sense which enabled him so to blacken a public grief as to give it the aspect of a national crime.

I was actually sacked from my first job. It was at a workshop for a short film this poet had written, about when she used to work in a strip club. After the first week, I was told not to come back.

I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I'm also a poet and have had work in the 'Spectator.'

RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.The rimer quenches his unheeded fires, The sound surceases and the sense expires. Then the domestic dog, to east and west, Expounds the passions burning in his breast. The rising moon o'er that enchanted land Pauses to hear and yearns to understand. --Mowbray Myles

REQUIEM, n. A mass for the dead which the minor poets assure us the winds sing o'er the graves of their favorites. Sometimes, by way of providing a varied entertainment, they sing a dirge.

Stand still, true poet that you are! / I know you; let me try and draw you. / Some night you'll fail us: when afar / You rise, remember one man saw you, / Knew you and named a star!

It is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age.

Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.

For the godly poet must be chaste himself, but there is no need for his verses to be so.

I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

Most joyful the Poet be; It is through him that all men see

We can say nothing but what hath been said . . . Our poets steal from Homer . . . he that comes last is commonly best.

When the poet died his cat was put to death and mummified.

Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.

To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty: to be a poet at forty is to be a poet

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

Poets are born, not paid.

Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog.

As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.

Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

Scientist alone is true poet.

Sad is his lot, who, once at least in his life, has not been a poet.

No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet,

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.

a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being

A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

I think it's hard to be taken seriously as a poet, period.

Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.

Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.

A poem's life and death dependeth still Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

I think we've come to a kind of splinter period in poetry. These tiny little bright fragments of observation - and not produced under sufficient pressure - some of it's very skillful, but I don't think there's anywhere a discernible major poet in the process of emerging; or if he is, I ain't seen him.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.

I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.

No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.

I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem

Honor is the greatest poet.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.

A poet not in love is out at sea; He must have a lay-figure.

We have been fortunate to have so noted a poet as a resident of our state. We mourn this great loss to our community.

We're all getting older. We should, the three of us, be playing these songs because, hey, the end is always near. Morrison was a poet, and above all, a poet wants his words heard.

Why need every honest poet be suspected of leading a quadruple life? Sometimes the second or third meaning is less interesting than the first, and the only really difficult thing about a poem is the critic's explanation of it

To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.

True, what you sacrifice for the world is but poorly recognized by it; for it is man that rules and reaps the harvest; the thousand night watches and sacrifices by which a mother secures the state a hero or a poet are forgotten, not even mentioned, for the mother herself does not mention them, and so one century after another do the wives, unknown and unrewarded send forth the arrows, the starts the storm-birds and the nightingales of time.

Yevtushenko has written that 'A poet in Russia is more than a poet,' and throughout his life he has tried to justify this sentiment, ... The Order of Friendship Between Peoples.

You shouldn't let poets lie to you.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

But I was a poet before I was an actor.

Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

What torments my soul is its loneliness. The more it expands among friends and the daily habits or pleasures, the more, it seems to me, it flees me and retires into its fortress. The poet who lives in solitude, but who produces much, is the one who enjoys those treasures we bear in our bosom, but which forsake us when we give ourselves to others. When one yields oneself completely to one's soul, it opens itself to one, and then it is that the capricious thing allows one the greatest of good fortunes... that of sympathizing with others, of studying itself, of painting itself constantly in its works.

To me it seems that one of the most important requisites for a great poet is a luminous style. The elements of poetry lie in natural objects, in the vicissitudes of human life, in the emotions of the human heart, and the relations of man to man.

Every poet who aspires to celebrity strives to approach the perfection of Pope and the sweetness of his versification.

Every dad who loves his daughter is not going to want her to go with the penniless slacker loser poet bum, when she could go out with someone who's successful.

As to ''Don Juan,'' confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

DIE, n. The singular of "dice." We seldom hear the word, because there is a prohibitory proverb, "Never say die." At long intervals, however, some one says: "The die is cast," which is not true, for it is cut. The word is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist, Senator Depew:A cube of cheese no larger than a die May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.

DIE, n. The singular of ""dice."" We seldom hear the word, because there is a prohibitory proverb, ""Never say die."" At long intervals, however, some one says: ""The die is cast,"" which is not true, for it is cut. The word is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist, Senator Depew:A cube of cheese no larger than a die May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.

'Empire of Self' is a loving portrait of a very difficult man. Jay Parini, himself a gifted novelist, poet and biographer, has gone very deep into the 'black energy' of Gore Vidal's relentless narcissism and megalomania. Parini envisions an epic battle between Vidal's angelic and demonic sides, yet there's very little of the angel in Vidal.

Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often, if not always, expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet

The tongue of a poet is always the last to be corrupted

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

The simplest conception of the origin and plan of the Iliad must, we think, prove the most correct. It originated, doubtless, in that desire, which every great poet must especially feel, of revealing to his age forms of nobler beauty and heroism than dwell in the minds of those around him.

The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.

Ted Hughes has been appointed poet laureate to succeed Sir John Betjeman, which is a bit like appointing a grim young crow to replace a cuddly old teddy bear.

Russell Baker writes columns as a poet writes light verse - with tongue in cheek and a steady hand.

Sad is the lot, who, once at least in his life, had not been a poet

Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.

Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

An old poet said, 'It's better to go to the Rose Bowl and lose than not to have gotten there at all.' What I want to do is keep going out there (to Pasadena) until we win one of those things.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman

A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong.

As a poet I am not primarily concerned with intellect. I'm not that smart. I want to make people laugh and cry.