Poetry Quotes

life sucks
indeed ,indeed
but you can't help but not
rid life of things you don't need

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

make it new

Though you are in your shining days,
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind and proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time's bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.

But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

"Simple things, And we make of them something so complex it defeats us, Almost."

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 the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

The tears I shed yesterday have become rain.

To you, O Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus, when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom and independence. For to the descendants of Herakles belongs dominion over sea and land.

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal...

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the prince of love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well ... [H]e has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, ... thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses ... Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant ... [its] own equivalent of oblivion.

Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ - that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

Each thing called improvement seems blackened with crimes,
If it tears up one record of blissful old times.