The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.

We are all born with genius. It's like our fairy Godmother. But what happens in life is that we stop listening to our inner voices, and we no longer have access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Mathematics and poetry are the two ways to drink the beauty of truth.

Now and then, teaching may approach poetry, and now and then it?may approach profanity. May I tell you a little story about the great?Einstein? I listened once to Einstein as he talked to a group of?physicists in a party. "Why have all the electrons the same charge?" said he. "Well, why are all the little balls in the goat dung of the same size?"?Why did Einstein say such things? Just to make some snobs to raise?their eyebrows? He was not disinclined to do so, I think. Yet,?probably, it went deeper. I do not think that the overheard remark of?Einstein was quite casual. At any rate, I learnt something from it:?Abstractions are important; use all means to make them more tangible.?Nothing is too good or too bad, too poetical or too trivial to clarify your?abstractions. As Montaigne put it: The truth is such a great thing that?we should not disdain any means that could lead to it. Therefore, if the spirit moves you to be a little poetical, or a little profane, in your class,?do not have the wrong kind of inhibition." - George Polya's Mathematical Discovery, Volume 11, pp 102, 1962.

Every poet knows that the gift of the Gods is not fire but language. "Man dwells poetically on this earth," H?lderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was?) and a future (there shall be?). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: "Defunctus adhuc loquitur" (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.

There are no lungs like the ones that breathe poetry.

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it's very healthy, because it's the only place where we never lie. At night we don't lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.

Sitting in a bar, I drink a few pints and quarts, this is how poetry comes to me at times, and sometimes it wants me to chase her.

To dance is to create poetry with your feet.

"The Poetry of Love