Jon Corelis > Jon's Quotes

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”
― John Keats

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
― T. S. Eliot

“The objects the imitator represents are actions.”
― Aristotle

“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance".”
― John Keats

“A big book is a big bore.”
― Callimachus

“The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad.”
― T.S. Eliot

“True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.”
― Alexander Pope

“Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”
― A. E. Housman

“For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
― T. S. Eliot

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
― William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems

“… that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“A naked Ayre without guide, or prop, or colour but his owne, is easily censured of everies eare, and requires so much the more invention to make it please.”
― Thomas Campion

“La musique doit humblement chercher à faire plaisir, l'extrême complication est le contraire de l'art”
― Claude Debussy

“When the Way prevails under Heaven, then show yourself; when it does not prevail, then hide. When the Way prevails in your own land, count it a disgrace to be needy and obscure; when the Way does not prevail in your land, then count it a disgrace to be rich and honoured.”
― Confucius, tr. Waley

“A word on Academies; poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don't understand how it's made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn't know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor.”
― Robert Graves

“The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them.”
― Robert Graves

“Les grands littérateurs n'ont jamais fait qu'une seule oeuvre.”
― Marcel Proust

“For years on years I have struggled with ink and hammer, O my
tortured heart, to make you an embroidery of fire and gold, an
orangetree hyancinth, a blossoming quince to console you …”
― Nikos Gatsos

“Say what you will in two
Words and get through.
Long, frilly
Palaver is silly.”
― Marie-Francoise-Catherine de Beauveau, tr. Ezra Pound

“Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?”
― William Shakespeare

“Poetry is a means of storing power: notably the magical power of love.”
― Robert Graves

“War is not so much a matter of weapons as of money.”
― Thucydides

“Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by nature they desire to rule.”
― Thucydides

“Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles, and murders. Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries.”
― Sophocles, tr. Jebb

“War is a harsh teacher, and tends to make most people's character the same as their situation.”
― Thucydides

“There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money.”
― Robert Graves

“In general men are more willing to be called clever villains than honest simpletons.”
― Thucydides