Quotation Explorer - 'Poet'

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing. - Countee Cullen
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist. - Neil Gaiman
A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed. - Jim Harrison
The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. - Denise Levertov
If you should see/a man/walking down a crowded street/ talking aloud/ to himself don't run/in the opposite direction but run toward him/for he is a poet! You have nothing to fear/from a poet but the truth - Ted Joans
Du er ogsaa Kunstnersjæl, Skønaand, en Smagens Mand, et Artistgemyt,en Bohême, en Satan. Men du er ogsaa Poet. Fan ved hva du er altsammen, du er meget spredt. - Knut Hamsun
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy? - W.H. Auden
A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity. - James Russell Lowell
MINSTREL, adj. Formerly a poet, singer or musician; now a nigger with a color less than skin deep and a humor more than flesh and blood can bear. - Ambrose Bierce
If you can't be the poet, be the poem. - David Carradine
Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law. - Lara Biyuts
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
A poet has to be a bit childlike at heart, and in that sense all the romantic stereotypes about poets being "eternal children", etc, are all accurate. They believe, whatever they may say, that art and words can change the world. - John Thomas Allen
You claim to love God, and yet you disobey GodThis is a bizarre way of reasoningSurely, the lover, if his love is true,Is most obedient to the one he loves. - Poet
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. - Walt Whitman
I'm not a poet and I know it. - Steph
The here, the now and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet and -- from time immemorial--the woman. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive. - Paul de Musset
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. - Jean Cocteau
To be a poet is a love affair, not a desire to dare. - Debasish Mridha
And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies - Rainer Maria Rilke
When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing." ~ , Poet - Strider Marcus Jones
The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world’s greatest love poems, because they’re love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists. - Álvaro de Campos
The poem is the poet, the dreamer the dream. - Marty Rubin
The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though he was full of ideas. My dear Degas, Mallarmé responded, poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words. - Stéphane Mallarmé
The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker. - Lafcadio Hearn
Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs. - W.H. Auden
IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership. - Ambrose Bierce
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. - Charles Baudelaire
Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. - C. S. Lewis
It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing. - Sofia Kovalevskaya
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. - Leonardo Da Vinci
If you were destined to be a poet, then you won't brainstorm for lines that rhymes. If you were destined to be a celebrity, then you shouldn't start searching for fans. If you are truly a god, then let others worship you! - Michael Bassey Johnson
A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader’s mind with the ecstasy of joy. - Debasish Mridha
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. - Jean Cocteau
A 21st century poet is a woman who can speak her mind and stand upright like a mountain with her convictions, but can adapt like water in an ever changing season without losing her genuine elements. - Roseville Nidea
A Poet never denies creativity entrance. - Micheline Jean Louis
A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover. - Munia Khan
Being a poet one confronts the limitation of language, how can the spirit be revealed under any restrictions. - Mohit.K.Misra
A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Inside every man there is a poet who died young.
No poet sings because he must sing. At least no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing.
A poet adds the awe factor to our ordinary perceptions. - Debasish Mridha
No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted. - W.H. Auden
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only a few have learned to savor the significance of solitude. Those who can glory in being alone on occasion are the saint or poet or explorer. - William P. Barker
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. - Vladimir Nabokov
Meet everyone with utmost respect and heartfelt love. Sir , POET 2013– Sir - Kristian Goldmund Aumann
A poet has a sacred duty. He has to hear unsung songs and see unseen beauty. - Debasish Mridha
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art. - Federico García Lorca
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about. - Ray Bradbury
When humankind cannot produce a philosopher to speak its mind, it longs for a poet to sing its heart - Subhan Zein
My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence. - Michelle Geaney
Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. - Sigmund Freud
When in love, every soul becomes a poet. - Lailah Gifty Akita
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. - David Carradine
A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight. - Aberjhani
to be a poet meansto live with a permanent wound forever susceptibleto either the shade of the skyor someone's eyes. - Sanober Khan
We all have a god and a poet inside us. The poet, the human; the god, the divine.It is by the grace of our god that we can find the divine inspiration with which to wax poetic about our human experiences. - Michele Jennae
Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them. - Robert Graves
The good poet sticks to his real loves, to see within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.
Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet. - Horace
Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. - Roman Payne
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them. - Eugène Ionesco
A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him. - Plato
An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer. - Marlon Brando
Every poet creates their own universe that looks more beautiful than reality. - M.F. Moonzajer
You have made me a love poet. - Kamand Kojouri
[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet. - Dylan Thomas
If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to. - Martin Langford
No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow," said Gidas moodily. "He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul." Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be. - Guy Gavriel Kay
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 was a poet. I had no expectations other than creating a world of art with words that would live on long after I was gone. - Jason E. Hodges
A poet that reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
Be a poet in action as well as in words. - Marty Rubin
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. - Robert A. Heinlein
If you can not be a poet, be the poem. - David Carradine
By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency. - William Carlos Williams
All a poet can do today is warn. - Wilfred Owen
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head. - G.K. Chesterton
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate. - Octavio Paz
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now? - J.G. Ballard
The poet is the poem. The dreamer is the dream. - Marty Rubin
A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any style of poetry.David J Delaney © - David J. Delaney
PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that -- "Stone walls do not a prison make," but a combination of the stone wall, the political parasite and the moral instructor is no garden of sweets. - Ambrose Bierce
...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'... - Janet Frame
The poet believed that 'Beauty' first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The poet believed that 'Beauty' entered the world the day the first child blushed. - Roman Payne
When you have crush you become nothing but a poet - Sikhwetha maanda stanley
Always be a poet, even in prose. - Charles Baudelaire
An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, —"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most joyful the Poet be;It is through him that all men see.
People are always asking me what my lyrics mean. Well I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyse his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there. - Freddie Mercury
Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal. - Thomas Carlyle
Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories? - B. F. Skinner
You don't have to suffer to be a poet - John Ciardi
Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds. - Michel de Montaigne
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. - H. L. Mencken
The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial... he cannot go along with currents and trends. - Alfred North Whitehead
Give a poet a pen - A. Jarrell Hayes
The mystic sees God in everything; the scientist, atoms; the poet, poetry. - Marty Rubin
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. - Vladimir Nabokov
You don't have to be a poet to express you feelings to her, just say whats in your mind and she will relate. - Unarine Ramaru
If life is a poem, be the poet. If life is a story, be the author. If life is an adventure, be the hero. To live any other way is a waste of this experience we call life. - Steve Maraboli
Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
A poet is a silent singer; he sings the deep songs of the soul silently. - Debasish Mridha
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs. - George Jean Nathan
For a poet reality is mysterious, imaginations are magical, and perceptions are magnificent. - Debasish Mridha
An ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a book-keeper. - E. O. Wilson
It’s been raining outside and I feel like a sad poet, hating my imagination pissing on the roof. - Munia Khan
God is the world's oldest poet; love is the world's oldest poem. - Matshona Dhliwayo
My heart aches for you! But don't despair! I am persuaded you will come about! Recollect what the poet says! I'm not sure which poet, but very likely it was Shakespeare, because it generally is, though why I can't imagine! - Georgette Heyer
Such was a poet and shall be and is-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand. - E.E. Cummings
To become the love of a poet is to become both a muse and an immortal all at the same time. - Jennifer Megan Varnadore
I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem. - jaime gil de beidma
I do have a funny perception of mine I'd like to share. Being basically a lifetime poet. I've had many people say "I don't like poetry" But they'll listen to song after song that rhymes on the end in couplets Just a thought... - Stanley Victor Paskavich
The history of time is captured by poet, artist, writer, photographer…! - Lailah Gifty Akita
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words. - Ovid
I am an i poet. - E.E. Cummings
The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact. - Fernando Pessoa
Envy won't make you a better poet. - Katerina Stoykova Klemer
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. - E.M. Forster
The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. - Walt Whitman
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. - G. K. Chesterton
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. - John Adams
How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty? - Joyce Carol Oates
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. - John Ciardi
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. - E.B. White
It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world. - Sanober Khan
Darkness is the womb from which a poet is born. - Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet
Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable. - Rabih Alameddine
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. - Ted Hughes
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry is no rocket science, a good poet writes from his heart! - Saru Singhal
Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be.That door of the library was the door into meAnd Lorca and Shelley said Come to the feast.Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East. - Bernard Kops
Cosmos and its stars; poet and his poetry! - Mehmet Murat ildan
The poet is much more the one who inspires,than the one who is inspired. - Paul Éluard
I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet. - François Mauriac
Someone asked me when is my birthday?The poet inside me replied,"My birthday is on the last day of the year,It's 31st December my dear! - Anamika Mishra
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets. - Dudley Moore
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. - Robert Frost
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. - Christopher Morley
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,Student of our sweet English tongue,Read out my words at night, alone:I was a poet, I was young.Since I can never see your face,And never shake you by the hand,I send my soul through time and spaceTo greet you. You will understand. - James Elroy Flecker
The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poet doesn't invent. He listens. - Jean Cocteau