A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A poet is a world enclosed in a man.”
“A poet is always living in kletic time, whatever her century. She is calling out, she is waiting. She lies down in the shade of the future and drowses among its roots. Her case is the genitive of remembering.”
Source: After Sappho
“A poet is an unhappy creature whose heart is tortured by deepest suffering but whose lips are so formed that when his sighs and cries stream out over them, their sound beomes like the sound of beautiful music . . . . And men flock about the poet saying, Sing for us soon again; that is to say, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before.”
“A poet is deeply conflicted and it's in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. The place is the harbor. It doesn't set the world in order, you know, it's the place of reconciliation. It's the Consolamentum, the kiss of peace.”
“A poet is he who feels what others feel but in extremity of feeling; to which we may add, the gift of using words fitly, words not so much chosen as drawn, like matter drawn by magnetism, out of an infinite atmosphere of them.”
“A poet is intensely in love with live and passionately wants to express his or her experience with love and beauty.”
“A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.”
“A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.”
“A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.”
Source: The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“A poet is not something you become; a poet is something you are.”
“A poet is, on the one hand, among the elect; on the other hand, he is one of the most insignificant of mortals. Hence we can draw a very consoling conclusion: the most insignificant of men are not altogether so worthless as we imagine. They may not be fit to occupy government positions or professorial chairs, but they are often extremely at home on Parnassus and such high places. Apollo rewards vice, and virtue, as everybody knows, is so satisfied with herself she needs no reward. Then why do the pessimists lament? Leibnitz was quite right: we live in the best possible of worlds. I would even suggest that we leave out the modification "possible.”
Source: All Things are Possible
“A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human beast.”
“A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.”
“A poet is simply an artist whose medium is human emotions. A poet chisels away at our own sensibilities, shaping our vision while molding our hearts. A poet wraps words around our own feelings and presents them as fresh gifts to humanity.”
Source: Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year
“A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
Source: E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised
“A poet is someone Who can pour Light into a spoon, Then raise it To nourish Your beautiful parched, holy mouth.”
“A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.”
Source: Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews
“a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being”
“A poet is someone who stands on the door sill and sees the room before her as a sea whose waves she might dive through. … A poet is someone who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention.”
Source: After Sappho
“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
“A poet is someone who who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention”
Source: After Sappho
“A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.”
“A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity -- he is continually in for -- and filling some other Body -- The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute -- the poet has none; no identity -- he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures.”
Source: Selected Letters
“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.”
Source: The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography
“A poet is the translator of the silent language of nature to the world.”
“A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.”
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
“A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.”
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
“A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers.”
Source: D'ri and I
“A poet may create or reminds.”
“A poet may create or reminds;
yet for both - the art is embraced by words.”
“A poet […] may talk nonsense, but it will probably be interesting nonsense.”
“A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.”
Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
“A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.”
Source: Minority Report
“A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them.”
“A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.”
Source: Essential Turgenev
“A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.”
“A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.”
“A poet must learn to wage war.”
“A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity”
Source: Poems
“A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.”
“A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden
"A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
“A poet must sing for his own people.”
Source: Victorian Poets: Revised and Extended by a Supplementary Chapter, to the Fiftieth Year of the Period Under Review
“A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.”
“A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.”
“A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.”
“A Poet never denies creativity entrance.”
“A poet never ever fears death!
As he knows his child will keep on writing his father’s endless poem!”
Source: Love Forever
“a poet never feels useful.”
Source: Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel