Quotes About Reflection

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Poems are difficult to silence.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

My heart was full of softening showers, I used to swing like this for hours, I did not care for war or death, I was glad to draw my breath.

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.