Robert > Robert's Quotes

“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”
― Pablo Neruda

“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

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.”
― Baudelaire

“Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.”
― Ossip Mandelstam

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
― T.S. Eliot

“You don't have to suffer to be a poet”
― John Ciardi

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
― Novalis

“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”
― John Cage

“Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.”
― William Stafford

“Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.”
― Voltaire

“There is another world, and it is in this one.”
― Paul Éluard

“Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.”
― Marvin Bell

“I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.”
― Mallarm

“Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.”
― Emerson

“There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.”
― Robert Graves

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”
― Christopher Morley

“Poetry is an orphan of silence.”
― Charles Simic

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
― Carl Sandburg

“The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.”
― Robert Penn Warren

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ”
― Jean Cocteau

“I sang in my chains like the sea”
― Dylan Thomas

“When power narrows the areas of a man's concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence”
― John F. Kennedy

“Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.”
― Stephen Dunn

“Maybe when water yearned for fire / it invented waves / so one day they might become flames”
― Ibrahim Nasrallah

“It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends”
― Czeslaw Milosz