All 78,476 Quotes

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To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Walt Whitman on poetry

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt on poetry

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Carl Sandburg on poetry

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson on poetry

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster on poetry

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
John Ruskin on poetry

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley on poetry

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen on poetry

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire on poetry

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Horace on poetry

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery on poetry

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg on poetry

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire on poetry

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis on poetry

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert on poetry

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Andre Gide on poetry

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats on poetry

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley on poetry

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert on poetry

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau on poetry