Poet Quotations

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

They talk most who have the least to say.

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.

Hope is but the dream of those who wake.

As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.

I am perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us, and yet when I even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the two sects.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

The age I'm at now, you go from being a young girl to suddenly you blossom into a woman. You ripen, you know? And then you start to rot.

I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.

I realize that humor isn't for everyone. It's only for people who want to have fun, enjoy life, and feel alive.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed the deeper they burn.

This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency---half tiger,half poet.

To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.

My situation is different from Mark's. I'm not looking for home runs, I'm looking for the playoffs.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

He played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace.

There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

I think one of the interesting things about poker is that once you let your ego in, you're done for.

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

Pressed caviar has the consistency of chilled tar.

Good health is not something we can buy. However, it can be an extremely valuable savings account.

To sigh, yet not recede; to grieve, yet not repent.

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.

Why should we strive, with cynic frown, to knock their fairy castles down?

If we thought it would improve our relationship, we would get married tomorrow, but as it is, nearly 7 years after we got engaged, we are content to wait.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

Touch us gently, Time! Let us glide adown thy stream, Gently, - as we sometimes glide Through a quiet dream!

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Ground not upon dreams; you know they are ever contrary.

In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where she wants and gets up and goes.

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion.

Glory to Man in the highest! For Man is the master of things.

We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is, why did other people stop?

Kristin Brown looks as though she could have been mailed first-class to New York for about a dollar and a half.

I don't know what idiocies drove me in those days, but they were naive, innocent idiocies in many ways.

A sword, a spade, and a thought should never be allowed to rust.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

Against her ankles as she trod The lucky buttercups did nod.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

Who would not rather trust and be deceived?

As it fell upon a day in the merry month of May, sitting in a pleasant shade which a grove of myrtles made.

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.

Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

What you make up in your heads sticks if it's good, falls out if it's bad. If we still remember something a day after we made it up, it might be worth building on.

Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

And 'tis remarkable that they talk most who have the least to say.

At this point in my life - age 24 - I have chosen a fairly strange path that not many are walking. I am a professional spoken word poet who tours the world performing and teaching. I run an organization called Project VOICE dedicated to using this art form as an education and empowerment tool in schools and communities of all kinds.

Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.

Grown men have been seen fleeing after reading the menu posted outside.

I have been sitting watching that ever since I came back, the continuous variations of light and shadow.

The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

Badness you can get easily, in quantity; the road is smooth, and it lies close by, But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it.

There's a magical tie to the land of our home, which the heart cannot break, though the footsteps may roam.

For we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.

We simply write the kind of music we enjoy most and hope that our audience will enjoy it too.

You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had.

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

By adversity are wrought the greatest works of admiration, and all the fair examples of renown, out of distress and misery are grown.

Be to their virtue very kind; be to their faults a little blind.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

I've been a character actress right from the beginning. I was no more like 'Cinderella' in my real life than I was like the neurotic poet in 'Cop.'

The particular article ought in my opinion to be treated with absolute contempt. It is too vile to touch.

If what I do prove well, it won't advance. They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance.

But in a tournament, you can be said in for all your money at any point so you can't make any mistakes so you have to, it's all about where you're sitting at the table.

I'll be me, but I don't like it.

Scrooge pushed past Mary number 1 and Joseph number 2 in the wings without so much as an "excuse me". Typical.

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

We must move in our recovery from one addiction to another for two major reasons: first, we have not recognized and treated the underlying addictive process, and second, we have not accurately isolated and focused upon the specific addictions.

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

Though language forms the preacher, 'Tis good works make the man.

Being by the nature of my upbringing, all my energies having been directed to one channel of activity, crippled from other activities and made helpless even to live.

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.

And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.