"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
— G.K. Chesterton (Alarms and Discursions)

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems)

"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."
— Randall Jarell

"Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
— T.S. Eliot

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"
— Gustave Flaubert

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world,
which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

From Dover Beach"
— Matthew Arnold (Dover Beach and Other Poems)

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
— Dylan Thomas

"Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed."
— William Blake

"There is no Frigate like a book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry..."
— Emily Dickinson

"PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to...to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."
— T.S. Eliot

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Complete Poems)

"Amor, ch'al cor gentile ratto s'apprende
prese costui de la bella persona
che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende.

Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona..."

"Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,
Seized him with my beautiful form
That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me.

Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,
took me so strongly with delight in him
That, as you see, it still abandons me not..."
— Dante Alighieri (Inferno)

"There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.

Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria.
- Inferno (V, 121),"
— Dante (Inferno (Modern Library Series) - translated by John Ciardi)

"There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either."
— Robert Graves

"Poetry might be described as the clear expression of mixed feelings."
— W.H. Auden (New Year Letter)

"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit."
— Robert Burns

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."
— William Shakespeare

"I've measured out my life in coffee spoons."
— T.S. Eliot

"From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of
Winning,
But laughter and the love of friends"
— Hilaire Belloc - Verses 10 "Dedicatory Ode"

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"A Book

THERE is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!"
— Emily Dickinson

"Fare well we call to hearth and hall
Though wind may blow and rain may fall
We must away ere break of day
Over the wood and mountain tall

To Rivendell where Elves yet dwell
In glades beneath the misty fell
Through moor and waste we ride in haste
And wither then we cannot tell

With foes ahead behind us dread
Beneath the sky shall be our bed
Until at last our toil be sped
Our journey done, our errand sped
We must away! We must away!
We ride before the break of day!"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.""
— William Butler Yeats

"The aim of writing poetry is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it.""
— W.H. Auden

"To See a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
— William Blake

"I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move"
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tennyson's Poetry)

"Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!"
— Mark Twain

"...life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis"
— e.e. cummings

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
— Robert Frost