Quotes by Famous Poets and Writers
“Poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Aristotle
“Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.” Isaac Asimov
“God is the perfect poet, who in his person acts his own creations.” Robert Browning
“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” Truman Capote
“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing — to find honest men to publish it – and to get sensible men to read it.” Charles Caleb Colton
“Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.” Alfred de Musset
“A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.” Emily Dickinson
“The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” Benjamin Franklin
“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.” “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” Sigmund Freud
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” Robert Frost
“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” Thomas Hardy
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” Ernest Hemingway
“You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.” Horace
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.” Samuel Johnson
“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.” “Poetry…should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” John Keats
“Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.” Lord Chesterfield
“A poem should not mean, but be.” Archibald MacLeish
“We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.” Somerset Maugham
“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” Plato
“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” Salvatore Quasimodo
“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.” George Sand
“And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.” William Shakespeare
“The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.” George Bernard Shaw
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Percy Bysshe Shelley
“The difference between any word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.“ Mark Twain
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Paul Valéry
“A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweler, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more.” Horace Walpole
“To have great poets there must be great audiences too.” Walt Whitman
“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.” Oscar Wilde
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.” William Butler Yeats
The quotes on this page are in the public domain; the image of William Shakespeare is also in the public domain, according to Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shakespeare.jpg
Photo Credit: The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London.