"You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search."
— Rick Riordan

"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."
— Hermann Hesse

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!"
— Allen Ginsberg

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me."
— Emily Dickinson

"What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone."
— Alexander Poe

"The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."
— Salvador Dali

"No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened."
— Walt Whitman

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."
— Oscar Wilde

"'He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.'"
— Nora Roberts (Born in Fire (Born In trilogy #1))

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
— W.H. Auden

"What is now proved was once only imagined."
— William Blake

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch (Barnes & Noble Classics))

"We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it."
— Dorianne Laux (The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry)

"Diamonds are only chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs, you see."
— Minnie Richard Smith

"A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet."
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets make a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
— Oscar Wilde

"I am a poet in deeds--not often in words."
— Ian Fleming (Goldfinger)

"Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?"
— J.G. Ballard

"...for sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

"Browsing the dim back corner
Of a musty antique shop
Opened an old book of poetry
Angels flew out from the pages
I caught the whiff of a soul
The ink seemed fresh as today
Was that voices whispering?
The tree of the paper still grows.
"
— Pixie Foudre

""A poem should not mean but be."

"
— Archibald MacLeish

"Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today."
— André Breton

"گوش دار
با گوش های تیز
تا سرانجام دریابی
تو تنها زندگی را می شنوی
مرگ را با تو سخنی نیست
مرگ سخن راندن نتواند
زندگان
از مرگ می گویند
زیرا که زنده اند
آن که سخن بر لب نمی آرد مر گ است
که سخن گزار نیست
سخن گداز است"
— اریش فرید، ترجمه خسرو تاقد

"After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin.
Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved."
— Piet Hein

"" Carpe diem.Seize the day, boys.
Make your lives extraordinary " "
— John Keating (Dead Poets Society)

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written."
— Oscar Wilde

"The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

" 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

"To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

""As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on." "
— Woody Allen

"Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question."
— Dorianne Laux (The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry)

"You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good."
— Dorianne Laux (The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry)

"They changed their minds, Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell."
— John Milton

"Die moeilikste ding wat ek my kan voorstel, is om ’n goeie liefdesgedig te skryf."
— Henning Pieterse