“The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
“I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God…or anything approaching a God…he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.”
— Dan Simmons, book The Fall of Hyperion
Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 504)
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American novelist 1948Related quotes
“God is the poet, men are only the actors.”
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654) French author, best known for his epistolary essays
Dieu est le poète et les hommes ne sont que les acteurs.
Socrate Chrétien, Discours VIII.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 42.
Socrate Chrétien (1662)
R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet
The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (1963), p. 8
“God's most candid critics are those of his children whom he has made poets.”
Walter Raleigh (professor) (1861–1922) British academic
Preface to Oxford Poetry for 1914 http://books.google.com/books?id=rRcGYxSyobsC&q=%22God's+most+candid+critics+are+those+of+his+children+whom+he+has+made+poets%22&pg=PAvii#v=onepage and 1914–1916 http://books.google.com/books?id=W5iRAAAAIAAJ&q=%22God's+most+candid+critics+are+those+of+his+children+whom+he+has+made+poets%22&pg=PA5#v=onepage.
“God thinks in the geniuses, dreams in the poets, and sleeps in the other people.”
Peter Altenberg (1859–1919) Austrian writer and poet
Gott denkt in den Genies, träumt in den Dichtern und schläft in den übrigen Menschen.
Der Nachlass von Peter Altenberg, p. 20
Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac
“December: Pines above the Snow”, p. 81.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"
“A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist