Poets Quotes

"In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies."

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

Charles Baudelaire

"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth."

Jean Cocteau

"A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

Robert Graves

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

Wallace Stevens

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

G. K. Chesterton

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

"Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too."

"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning."

James Dickey

"The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven."

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact."

"There are other poets in the world, very good ones – but they say Ghalib's style of expression is something else."

Mirza Ghalib

"The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name."

Jane Kenyon

"The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty."

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

William Faulkner

"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."

Randall Jarrell

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

T. S. Eliot

"All poets are mad."

Robert Burton

"Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a versifier."