Poetry Quotes - To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary

 

Poetry Quotes - To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary 

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.

Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day

I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.”

― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

 

“I give you this to take with you:

Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can

begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.”

― Judith Minty, Letters to My Daughters

 

“I walked a mile with Pleasure;

She chatted all the way;

But left me none the wiser

For all she had to say.

 

I walked a mile with Sorrow;

And ne’er a word said she;

But, oh! The things I learned from her,

When Sorrow walked with me.”

― Robert Browning Hamilton

 

“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”

― George Eliot, Middlemarch

 

“Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

― T.S. Eliot

 

“That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.”

― Andrea Gibson

 

“To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.”

― Edgar Allan Poe

 

“In the Desert

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

 

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

― Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines

 

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”

― Wystan Hugh Auden

 

“Life is but a day;

A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way

From a tree’s summit.”

― John Keats, The Complete Poems

 

“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”

― Edgar Allan Poe

 

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.”

― John Keats, The Complete Poems

 

“I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

 

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

“If we surrendered

to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

 

“You will hear thunder and remember me,

And think: she wanted storms. The rim

Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,

And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”

― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

and rightdoing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.”

― Rumi

 

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

― Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

 

“Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.”

― Mario Benedetti

 

“All this time

I drank you like the cure when maybe

you were the poison.”

― Clementine von Radics

 

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted.”

― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

 

“Lovers find secret places

inside this violent world

where they make transactions

with beauty.”

― Rumi

 

“Sometimes I sit alone under the stars and think of the galaxies inside my heart and truly wonder if anyone will ever want to make sense of all that I am”

― Christopher Poindexter

 

“So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.

-- Robert Frost”

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

 

"Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,

Seized him with my beautiful form

That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me.

 

Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,

took me so strongly with delight in him

That, as you see, it still abandons me not...”

― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

 

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

 

“To hear never-heard sounds,

To see never-seen colors and shapes,

To try to understand the imperceptible

Power pervading the world;

To fly and find pure ethereal substances

That are not of matter

But of that invisible soul pervading reality.

To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;

To be a lantern in the darkness

Or an umbrella in a stormy day;

To feel much more than know.

To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;

To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;

To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;

To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets

Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.

To be a smile on the face of a woman

And shine in her memory

As a moment saved without planning.”

― Dejan Stojanovic