"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
— T.S. Eliot

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

"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."
— Edgar Allan Poe

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

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

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

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."
— Charles Baudelaire

"A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
— Salman Rushdie

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."
— Robert Frost

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
— Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works)