Quotes about poet

A collection of quotes on the topic of poet, poetry, likeness, world.

Quotes about poet

“She, perhaps, with a consciousness that many of us in adulthood lack or simply lost, would associate that so much water falling on our fat and heavy heads was due to the crying of some poet who was walking by.”

José Baroja book Un hijo de perra y otros cuentos

Adulthood, Water, Cry

“As a poet I am an emotional accident; a lyrical tourist.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Klairet Levy, R. Interview to José Baroja. http://letras.mysite.com/jbar050923.html

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Soul

“I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”

Aleister Crowley book Moonchild

Source: Moonchild

Way

“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

As quoted in In factor of the sensitive man, and other essays (1976 edition) by Anais Nin, p.14
Attributed from posthumous publications

“Some people say I was a thug and a gangster; other people remember me as a poet and a born leader. But I'm saying to you, measure a man by his actions fully, through his whole life, from the beginning to the end.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Posthumous attributions, Tupac: Resurrection (2003)

Life, People

“For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

196
The Symposium

Love

“Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Love, Flowers, Lovers, Sun

“And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Lovers

“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

Dreams, Sleep

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning (1946; 1959; 1984)
Context: A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. … For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

Love, Life, Wisdom, Truth

“Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Death, People, Sadness, Lovers

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Life, War, People, World

“Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.”

Wole Soyinka (1934) Nigerian writer

“They are fools who kiss and tell'--
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Fools, Kiss

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

World, Lying, Thinking, Time

“EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it… every, every minute?"

STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe… they do some.”

Thornton Wilder Our Town

Source: Our Town

Life

“I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
into a new tongue.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Pain, Pleasure, Soul, Hell

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

“The person who does not control his territory does not control his existence. If someone is not conscious, he is taken over, not only outwardly but also with the thoughts that assault him. He is very vulnerable to desires and feelings. For example, you live calmly with your wife, and then—catastrophe! Suddenly you lose control because you have fallen in love with another. You don't have to fall victim to that reality; what you have to do is navigate in it, overcome the winds and sandstorms. Amid the storms at sea and the signs, you must move forward calmly and look toward the port you're heading for. In New York, when I was filming The Holy Mountain, I had problems of all sorts. I soaked six or seven T-Shirts a night with my sweat. I went to see a Chinese sage that someone had recommended. He was a poet, a great master of tai chi, and a doctor. When he first saw me, he said, "What is your purpose in life?" I was disconcerted and did not answer. He continued, "If you do not tell me what is your purpose in life, I cannot heal you."”

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) Filmmaker and comics writer

So I understood that if a ship crosses the sea without a purpose, it will arrive at no port. What prevents life from devouring us is having a purpose. The higher it is, the further it will carry us...
Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

Love, Life, Feeling, Mountain

“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year…”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Way, Sense, Success

“The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

World, Beauty, Way, Mathematics

“Let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth—in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes. You, Simmias and Cebes, and all other men, will depart at some time or other. Me already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Life, Men, Fate, Pleasure

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Squares and Oblongs, in Poets at Work (1948), p. 170

Love, Passion, Personality

“I realized that it was not by wisdom that poets write their poetry, but by a kind of nature or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets; for these also say many beautiful things, but do not know anything of what they say.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

22c
Plato, Apology

Wisdom, Beauty, Nature

“It is not correct to say that Valmiki is the only Ramayana poet. There are thousands of Ramayana poets. There is a Ramayana poet in every village.”

Kuvempu (1904–1994) Kannada novelist, poet, playwright, critic, and thinker

He stated when he deviated from the Valmiki Ramayana epic story and was criticized for the changes made. Quoted in [Mandakranta Bose Director of the Center for India and South Asia Research and the Institute of Asian Research University of British Columbia, The Ramayana Revisited, http://books.google.com/books?id=F_vuoXvAUfQC&pg=PA140, 1 September 2004, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-803763-7, 140–]

“The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly. Come someday to my laboratory and see the unequivocable testimony of the crescograph.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

India's Great Scientist, J.C. Bose

Truth

“Healing hurts. But what hurts more is the refusal of the call. The true pain of living is the abandonment of self, the mind-body split that makes us fear life. Our ache may be heavy and our souls tired today, but resistance makes it all feel a thousand times worse. Rejection of where we are amplifies suffering. Until we cannot take it anymore. Until there is no way out but in. Diving into the blackness, we discover not death but more abundant life. This is the great paradox of healing, which all great artists and poets and seers have known. We die into our trauma and discover our courage. The fiercest warriors are the ones who have let life break and remake them a thousand times over. The gods of healing are calling through your pain today. Healing hurts, yes, but the hurt itself may eventually heal you.”

Jeff Foster (1980) Spiritual teacher

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-16fjMHi5o/

“There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.”

Emile Zola (1840–1902) French writer (1840-1902)

Letter to Paul Cézanne (16 April 1860), as published in Paul Cézanne : Letters (1995) edited by John Rewald.

Men

“A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Perfection

“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Imagination

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1987) by Pierre Cabanne
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989

“I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

Love

“love wasn't the soft, silky words the poets spoke of. Love, with it's twin edges, was the one factor that weakened so many women, that pushed them to compromised their own wants, their own needs for the needs and wants of another.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Sweet Revenge

Love, Women

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948) Novelist, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Variant: nobody hαs ever meαsured, not even poets, how much the heαrt cαn hold.

For Wife, love, Wise, Relationship

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Imagination, Lovers

“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Feeling, Loss, Reading

“He's probably their battle poet, too."
"You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?"
"No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy…. When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode.”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

Training

“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Love

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”

Christopher Morley book Parnassus on Wheels

Source: Parnassus on Wheels

“… who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Heart

“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, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.”

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) American poet, translator

People, Truth, Beauty, Way

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Context: It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see.

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

Courageous, Courage, Madness

“I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.”

Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929–1990) Spanish poet

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

Gaston Bachelard book The Poetics of Space

Source: The Poetics of Space

“You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 19
Context: It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Love

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

"The Children of the Poets," The Pall Mall Gazette http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/1307/ (October 14, 1886) <br class="br">Variant: One can survive everything nowadays except death.

“a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

Hope, Thinking, Time, Personality

“Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Peace

“Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Angels

“while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Feeling, Time

“Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”

Alice Munro (1931) Canadian novelist

Source: Dear Life: Stories

Perfection

“My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

People, Feeling

“At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.”

Seth Godin (1960) American entrepreneur, author and public speaker

Source: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Age

“Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.”

Stephen King book The Body

Source: The Body

Love

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

Life, Understanding, Sense

“Girls, there are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book The Book of Images

Source: The Book of Images

Girl, Star, Learning, Distant

“…(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)…”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Lovers, Tear

“Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Source: The Complete Fairy Tales

Love, Fashion

“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: Libro del desasosiego

“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

God

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

“Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Housing, Madness

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903) as translated by M. D. Herter Norton (1993)
Source: Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Life, Indifference

“God is the perfect poet.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

God, Perfection

“A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“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

God, People, Dreams, Thinking

“The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

Lecture, "The Themes of Robert Frost" (1947)

“We painters use the same license as poets and madmen.”

Paolo Veronese (1523–1588) Italian painter of the Renaissance

Unsourced variant translation: We painters take the same liberties as poets and madmen.
Testimony to the Inquisition, (1573)

“Socrates: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.
Phaedrus: Clearly.
Socrates: And what is well and what is badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?”

Plato book Phaedrus

258d (tr. Benjamin Jowett)
paraphrased in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig: "And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
Phaedrus

“The only hidden meaning of things
Is that they have no hidden meaning.
It's the strangest thing of all,
Stranger than all poets' dreams
And all philosophers' thoughts,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand.
Yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
Things have no meaning: they have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

O único sentido oculto das coisas
É elas não terem sentido oculto nenhum,
É mais estranho do que todas as estranhezas
E do que os sonhos de todos os poetas
E os pensamentos de todos os filósofos,
Que as coisas sejam realmente o que parecem ser
E não haja nada que compreender.
Sim, eis o que os meus sentidos aprenderam sozinhos:—
As coisas não têm significação: têm existência.
As coisas são o único sentido oculto das coisas.
Alberto Caeiro (heteronym), O Guardador de Rebanhos ("The Keeper of Sheep"), XXXIX, trans. Richard Zenith.

Dreams, Understanding, Sense, Learning

“We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Answering a toast, "To the Babies," at a banquet in honor of General U.S. Grant (November 14, 1879). <br class="br">The Writings of Mark Twain, Vol. 20 (1899), ed. Charles Dudley Warner, p. 397 http://books.google.com/books?id=mRARAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA397

Baby

“See I'm a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Renegade"

“I am like a poet on the threshold of a work, an accursed, sterile poet who will leave no glory behind, to whom chance lent the truth that genius would have given him, a frail work which will pass away with me, mortal and sealed to others like myself, but a sublime work nevertheless, which will show the essential outlines of life and relate the drama of dramas.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV

Life, Truth, Chance

“To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. I, ch. 7
The Return of the Native (1878)

Beauty, Study, Wedding, Suffering

“Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

Letter 4: Theosophy of Julius
The Philosophical Letters

Truth, Time, Sun, Future

“Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
Between flesh and what's fantasy and the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Jungleland"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)

Death, Night, Dead

“I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

Love, Men, Beauty, Angels

“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, Children

“And what shall I say of the poets? Oh, this poor century of ours! In the coming year many of them will make their start, but not one of them is as bad as Cervantes, or idiotic enough to praise Don Quixote.”

Lope De Vega (1562–1635) Spanish playwright and poet

De poetas no digo: buen siglo es éste. Muchos están en ciernes para el año que viene; pero ninguno hay tan malo como Cervantes ni tan necio que alabe a don Quijote.
Letter dated August 14, 1604; cited from Nicolás Marín (ed.) Cartas (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1985) p. 68. Translation by Ilsa Barea, from Sebastià Juan Arbó Cervantes: Adventurer, Idealist, and Destiny's Fool (London: Thames and Hudson, 1955) p. 204.

“When we did Cubist paintings [Picasso and Georges Braque, in their early Cubist period in Paris], our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets [a. o. Appolinaire and Cendral] followed our endeavor attentively but they never dictated it to us.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Quote of Picasso in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Winter, Painting

“Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.”

Gottlob Frege Sense and reference

Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference.
Über Sinn und Bedeutung, 1892

Art, Idea

“The clock of doom had struck as fated;
the poet, without a sound,
let fall his pistol on the ground.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 6, st. 30.

Fate

“It seems to me that this last piece, The Poet Speaks, which is the title Schumann gave to this immortal work, should be a transition into a kind of intimate reverie. It is not just about making a beautiful sound and expressive phrasing. You also need to create a sense of dreaming. The truth is, you need to dream this piece, rather than play it.
Will you allow me to take your place? These two phrases are not connected. They are two different elements… of the same musical state. Here, like a question… And here again, another, tenderly asking the way. And from this moment, you should convey the music not just through the notes but through some kind of inspiration drawn from its immortal spirit. Now the sonorities should fade away…grow fainter and dimmer…and you are left simply in the presence of a reminiscent dream.”

Alfred Cortot (1877–1962) Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor

Alfred Cortot: Master Class on Schumann Kinderszenen (1953) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUNNNNj_Qw

Truth, Beauty, Dreams, Music

“The division of Philosopher and Poet is only apparent, and to the disadvantage of both. It is a sign of disease, and of a sickly constitution.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Novalis (1829)

Disease

“The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Novalis (1829)

World

“I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought they knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom — therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to myself and the oracle that I was better off as I was.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

22d–e
Plato, Apology

Wisdom, Error, Knowledge

“All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is a striving, an aspiration of the “lower” toward the “higher,” the “unformed” toward the “formed,” … “appearance” towards “essence,” “ignorance” towards “knowledge,” a “mean between fullness and privation,” as Plato says in the Symposium. … The universe is a great chain of dynamic spiritual entities, of forms of being ranging from the “prima materia” up to man—a chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by the higher, which never turns back but aspires upward in its turn. This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love. Too little attention has been given to the peculiar relation between this idea of love and the principle of the “agon,” the ambitious contest for the goal, which dominated Greek life in all its aspects—from the Gymnasium and the games to dialectics and the political life of the Greek city states. Even the objects try to surpass each other in a race for victory, in a cosmic “agon” for the deity. Here the prize that will crown the victor is extreme: it is a participation in the essence, knowledge, and abundance of “being.” Love is only the dynamic principle, immanent in the universe, which sets in motion this great “agon” of all things for the deity.
Let us compare this with the Christian conception. In that conception there takes place what might be called a reversal in the movement of love. The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this “condescension,” through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and becomes equal to God. …
There is no longer any “highest good” independent of and beyond the act and movement of love! Love itself is the highest of all goods! The summum bonum is no longer the value of a thing, but of an act, the value of love itself as love—not for its results and achievements. …
Thus the picture has shifted immensely. This is no longer a band of men and things that surpass each other in striving up to the deity. It is a band in which every member looks back toward those who are further removed from God and comes to resemble the deity by helping and serving them.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 85-88

Love, Life, Men, God

“As parents in private life teach wisdom to their children, so do [poets] in public life to their cities.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

143.
Every Good Man is Free

Life, Wisdom, Children, Parent

“Round and round, like a dance of snow
In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go
Floating the women faded for ages,
Sculptured in stone on the poet's pages.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Women and Roses.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Women, Age, Dance

“"O star on the breast of the river!
O marvel of bloom and grace!
Did you fall right down from heaven,
Out of the sweetest place?
You are white as the thoughts of an angel,
Your heart is steeped in the sun --
Did you grow in the Golden City,
My pure and radiant one?”

“Nay, nay, I fell not out of heaven;
None gave me my saintly white;
It slowly grew from the darkness,
Down in the dreary night.
From the ooze of the silent river,
I win my glory and grace,
White souls fall not, O my poet,
They rise to the sweetest place."”

Mary Butts (1890–1937) Novelist

The Water Lily, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Angels, Soul, Star, Sun

“The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l'initiative aux mots.
"Crise de Vers", La Revue Blanche (September 1895 )as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 55.
Observations