c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Success consecrates the most offensive crimes.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Desire is the most important factor in the success of any athlete.
— Bill Shoemaker
Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.
— Tennessee Williams
Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.
— Desiderius Erasmus
Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.
— Fran Lebowitz
Success is following the pattern of life one enjoys most.
— Al Capp
The only question to ask yourself is, how much are you willing to sacrifice to achieve this success?
— Larry Flynt
There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don't like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don't spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.
— Michael Dell
What material success does is provide you with the ability to concentrate on other things that really matter. And that is being able to make a difference, not only in your own life, but in other people's lives.
— Oprah Winfrey
Whatever success I've had, I always like to top it.
— Bernie Mac
Nobody travels on the road to success without a puncture or two.
— Navjot Singh Sidhu
Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you'll have left is your character.
— Vince Gill
Success is not in never failing, but rising everytime you fall!
— Jonathan Taylor Thomas
Four years of football are calculated to breed in the average man more of the ingredients of success in life than almost any academic course he takes.
— Knute Rockne
To these ideals which were instilled in me when I was a youth, I attribute in a large degree the success that was mine on the bicycle tracks of the world.
— Major Taylor
All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.
— Danny Thomas
Currently, only 70 percent of our high school students earn diplomas with their peers, and less than one-third of our high school students graduate prepared for success in a four-year college.
— Ruben Hinojosa
The success of each of us benefits us all, and the success of us all benefits each of us individually.
— Walter Ulbricht
I believe success is preparation, because opportunity is going to knock on your door sooner or later but are you prepared to answer that?
— Omar Epps
I attribute my success to my mental approach to the game. I have always been a serious student of umpiring. I enjoy studying rules, situations, and positioning.
— Jim Evans
Well, you would have to say what is the criteria to determine the success of any merger? It would have to be that the companies are stronger financially, that they took market share, and they are on a very steady footing in terms of their performance.
— Kevin Rollins
Every success in limiting armaments is a sign that the will to achieve mutual understanding exists, and every such success thus supports the fight for international law and order.
— Ludwig Quidde
I worked half my life to be an overnight success, and still it took me by surprise.
— Jessica Savitch
Telecom is a dramatic success in India and our view is, respecting the political process, and respecting the fact that these are sovereign decisions, is that, approaching India as a friend.
— John W. Snow
Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environment.
— Keith Henson
Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning.
— Mikhail Lermontov
The secret of my success is my hairspray.
— Richard Gere
Greatness is so often a courteous synonym for great success.
— Philip Guedalla
Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!
— Andrew Carnegie
Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.
— P. G. Wodehouse
To follow, without halt, one aim: that's the secret of success.
— Anna Pavlova
Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.
— Claude M. Bristol
Temporary success can be achieved in spite of lack of other fundamental qualities, but no advancements can be maintained without hard work.
— William Feather
Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. 
— Walter Lippmann
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
— Gustave Flaubert
We're not afraid of risking what was our success yesterday in order to explore some new field. We're adventurous. We like the challenge of unknown territory, unknown artistic field, and that's what stimulates us.
— Guy Laliberte
My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.
— Simon Cowell
Success isn't always going to be a huge contract success is going to be if you just live out your purpose in life. 
— Allan Houston
Awards are not the only markers of success I don't judge myself just based on them. I believe that each cinema-goer has his own mental trophies. 
— Fan Bingbing
Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they're rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.
— Bill Gates
The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly.
— Cecil B. DeMille
I have more love, success, and security than I could ever dream of.
— George Michael
Money does not guarantee success.
— Jose Mourinho
I'm not a defender of old or new football managers. I believe in good ones and bad ones, those that achieve success and those that don't.
— Jose Mourinho
It's the price of success: people start to think you're omnipotent.
— Ben Bernanke
We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work.
— Iain Duncan Smith
Hopefully I'll continue to have the success I've had.
— Tiger Woods
Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.
— Henry Louis Gates
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
— Henry Louis Gates
It's not just the 'Grammys' that I've pulled out of. I also pulled out of the English awards as well. The reason that I wanted to pull out was because I believe very much that the music industry as a whole is mainly concerned with material success.
— Alanis Morissette
The one thing that makes me feel super lucky about my financial success is that I have a housekeeper.
— Gwen Stefani
Commercial success still hasn't come to an artist that isn't signed to a record label. There are very few artists that can succeed without the help of a record label. The role of the record label is still required, it's still necessary.
— Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
Young people need the hands-on training that comes with a summer job. They need to know how to dress for success and nail job interviews. But most of all, they need mentorship, guidance, and inspiration.
— Hilda Solis
My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
So I feel like success is opportunity plus preparation, so work begets work, and as long as you're prepared it's going to continue to come your way.
— Anthony Mackie
I think that when we have a better educated society, when there is less violence in our cities, when people get back into the workforce and have the opportunity to take care of themselves and their families - that for me really is the kind of success and the kind of America that I think most of us still want, we aspire to.
— Michael Nutter
Entrepreneurs can't forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan - and on the brink of success.
— Eric Ries
We crave instant success these days. If you are a really good sprinter and long jumper, you don't want to spend two or three years on a whole new set of events. You're used to doing well and it's difficult to give that up.
— Daley Thompson
Our worldly successes cannot be guaranteed, but our ability to achieve spiritual success is entirely up to us, thanks to the grace of God. The best advice I know is to give is to give those worldly things your best but never your all - reserve the ultimate hope for the only one who can grant it.
— Mitt Romney
Prospering just doesn't have to do with money.
— Joel Osteen
A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.
— Orison Swett Marden
Super-ambitious goals tend to be unifying and energizing to people but only if they believe there's a chance of success. 
— Peter Diamandis
Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
— Ambrose Bierce
Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.
— Bruce Springsteen
In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
— Henry Ward Beecher
If you want to achieve things in life, you've just got to do them, and if you're talented and smart, you'll succeed.
— Juliana Hatfield
Not every difficult and dangerous thing is suitable for training, but only that which is conducive to success in achieving the object of our effort.
— Epictetus
I am highly offended by the total lack of acknowledgement of my contribution to Laker success.
— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
I have no time for those who say there is no way Scotland could go it alone. I know first-hand the contribution Scotland and Scots make to Britain's success - so for me there's no question about whether Scotland could be an independent nation.
— David Cameron
Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice.
— Barbra Streisand
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Success is survival.
— Leonard Cohen
I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.
— Jim Carrey
A lot of people don't have near the amount of success as I've been blessed to have, and it's all about working hard and hoping that continues.
— Luke Bryan
As an actor there's a lot of scrutiny and, even when you've had success, it becomes about sustaining that success. A friend of mine described it as a peakless mountain. Even for De Niro there's Pacino and for Pacino there's De Niro.
— Eddie Redmayne
I'm extremely ambitious. I don't know why people are afraid to say that. I won't sell my soul to the devil, but I do want success and I don't think that's bad.
— Jada Pinkett Smith
I feel lucky because I was a nerd, which I talk about in the book, but I had academic success, so through that, because that's what my parents put a great deal of value on, I had a great childhood because I sort of fulfilled the expectations of being good at school.
— Mindy Kaling
I saw a lot of people have success handed to them that then exploited it. They didn't protect it or cherish it.
— Aaron Paul
Our success in Singapore was a Herculean effort by the whole team. Now I am determined to deliver on all we promised. I will be watching like a hawk.
— Sebastian Coe
From success you get a lot of things, but not that great inside thing that love brings you.
— Samuel Goldwyn
Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
— Charles de Montesquieu
At Princeton I gained a great deal of pleasure from success in my classes. knowing that I could accomplish those things, and I realized that my success was directly proportionate to the work I put in.
— Brooke Shields
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
— Christopher Lasch
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
— Lily Tomlin
The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.
— Sammy Davis, Jr.
Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.
— Anne Rice
All men's gains are the fruit of venturing.
— Herodotus
I always envisioned myself being a rapper and being in the game and having success, but you never know what it feels like or how you're going to be when you're there.
— Wiz Khalifa
It's our nature: Human beings like success but they hate successful people.
— Carrot Top
When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task.
— George Soros
Success in any endeavor depends on the degree to which it is an expression of your true self.
— Ralph Marston
Whatever success I may have attained is due to the fact that since I was old enough to work at all, my ambition has never deserted me.
— Anna Held
I would love to be a guest on a talk show or a panel that shows women who have been on reality shows who've had success, to prove to audiences that you don't have to be a fool to become successful.
— NeNe Leakes
You take all the things that frighten you, and when you can get them to work for you all of sudden people are calling you a success.
— Randy Bachman
If you can figure out my success on the screen, you're a better man than I.
— Alan Ladd
I'm used to adversity and working really well in difficult situations. It was hard for me to accept the success.
— Paula Cole
Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person.
— John Forbes Nash, Jr.
We fall forward to succeed.
— Mary Kay Ash
People fall forward to success.
— Mary Kay Ash
I don't think about financial success as the measurement of my success.
— Christie Hefner
Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?
— Jeff Rich
Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.
— Elias Canetti
Success doesn't mean that you are healthy, success doesn't mean that you're happy, success doesn't mean that you're rested. Success really doesn't mean that you look good, or feel good, or are good.
— Victoria Principal
That's the key to success, isn't it? It has to be fun.
— Monica Seles
I'm still craving approval from my parents. It took a lot of success for me to realize it was never coming. It's just not in their nature.
— Andrew Stanton
The success and the failure are not my concern, but His.
— Joseph Barber Lightfoot
Choose something you like to do. I know it's a cliche, and you've heard it over and over. But the reason is, you're going to have to work long and hard to achieve any success. You better like it or life is going to be terrible.
— Bill Kurtis
People say we were an overnight success. It took us a year to be an overnight success.
— James Daly
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
— Warren Beatty
People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.
— Keith Henson
Action leads to Attention. that in the short-term releases Rewarding brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success.
— Keith Henson
I have gone from being a 21-year-old with wide eyes to a 24-year-old woman. With success comes a lot of responsibility and power.
— Vanessa Carlton
My success is not due to any personal superiority over other people.
— John Philip Sousa
Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.
— Danny Glover
Instead of this confusion, we need the unifying force of an official language, English, which is the language of success in America.
— Ernest Istook
If people ask me for the ingredients of success, I say one is talent, two is stubbornness or determination, and third is sheer luck. You have to have two out of the three. Any two will probably do.
— Fred Saberhagen
Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.
— Lillian Hellman
I take great pride in all the tremendous success we've enjoyed at CBS. And the good news is that I feel even more enthusiastic about what my terrific team and I will accomplish going forward.
— Leslie Moonves
I am decidedly of the opinion that in very many instances we can trace such a necessary connexion, especially among birds, and often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain.
— Alfred Russel Wallace
In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.
— Arthur Helps
But the best teams I've encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.
— Jesse James Garrett
I want to make sure I don't interfere with the success of that team next year. I don't see any way I could go to practice like most of 'em do, and not hurt the team. I'd go nuts if I tried doing that.
— Bear Bryant
It's harder to be a success, globally, and be artistic. Harder to have that balance than just to be artistic when nobody understands you.
— Andre Benjamin
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
— Jean Genet
Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
— Sloan Wilson
My dad told me, 'It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success', and it took me seventeen and a half years.
— Adrien Brody
Rockefeller once explained the secret of success. 'Get up early, work late - and strike oil.'
— Joey Adams
Change can either challenge or threaten us. Your beliefs pave your way to success or block you.
— Marsha Sinetar
I am very optimistic, and I wish that God almighty grants me success to get a qualifying time. Only then can I go to the Olympics. If this happens I will be the first Palestinian athlete to gain a qualifying time. This will be a big achievement.
— Nader al-Masri
Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.
— Vanessa Redgrave
Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey.
— Alex Noble
A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
— Henry Hazlitt
Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.
— Alice Foote MacDougall
It's not enough that I should succeed - others should fail.
— David Merrick
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
— Albert Einstein
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
— Robert Frost
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
— Plutarch
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
— Carl Sandburg
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
— T. S. Eliot
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
— T. S. Eliot
There's a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that's a bit blurred in my mind.
— Bo Burnham
Immature poets imitate mature poets steal. 
— T. S. Eliot
You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
— Carol Ann Duffy
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
— Jhumpa Lahiri
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
— Niels Bohr
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
— James Joyce
Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.
— Nikki Giovanni
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
— Alice Walker
I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.
— Billy Collins
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
— Don Marquis
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
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
— Steven Wright
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
— Vincent Van Gogh
Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
— B. B. King
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
— Edward Hirsch
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
— Umberto Eco
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
— Michael Eric Dyson
If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.
— Philip Sidney
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
— John Keats
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
— Rita Dove
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
— Allen Ginsberg
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.
— Jim Morrison
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
— Howard Nemerov
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
— Salman Rushdie
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
— Thomas Gray
Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
— F. Sionil Jose
America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.
— Ben Shapiro
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
— Russell Baker
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
— Edmund Burke
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
— Maya Angelou
There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.
— Edward Hirsch
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English. 
— Alfred Nobel
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
— Romesh Gunesekera
If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.
— Joseph Brodsky
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
— Wislawa Szymborska
Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.
— Sarah Kay
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
— Seamus Heaney
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
— William Rose Benet
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
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
— Paul Valery
I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
— Keith Haring
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
— Victor Hugo
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
— Bob Dylan
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
— Carl Sandburg
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
— John Cage
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
— Lionel Trilling
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
— Muriel Rukeyser
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears. 
— Octavio Paz
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
God is the perfect poet.
— Robert Browning
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
— Paul Muldoon
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
— Carol Ann Duffy
As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.
— Gary Hamel
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry I think I uncover the problems. 
— Margaret Atwood
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
— Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
— John Berger
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
— Eavan Boland
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
— Kapil Sibal
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
— Bertrand Russell
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
— Wallace Stevens
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
— T. S. Eliot
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
— Allen Ginsberg
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
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
— William Butler Yeats
I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
— Judy Collins
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
— Vanessa Redgrave
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
— Vladimir Nabokov
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
— Wallace Stevens
That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.
— Galway Kinnell
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
— Gustave Flaubert
I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.
— Charlie Sheen
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.
— Wislawa Szymborska
You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.
— Sherman Alexie
I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.
— Eminem
I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
— Carol Ann Duffy
If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.
— Glen Hansard
It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.
— John Singer Sargent
If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'
— Taylor Mali
When I rap, I get to express myself in a way where putting words together is like poetry, and sometimes it's better to talk in certain expressions than sing, you know? So I love, I love to rhyme when I want to express certain things.
— Wyclef Jean
I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.
— Eminem
I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.
— Alice Oswald
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
— Seamus Heaney
Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.
— John Trudell
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
— Jim Harrison
I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.
— Hozier
Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
— Joshua Logan
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
— Lucille Clifton
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
— Robert Graves
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
— Paul Auster
The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.
— Mark Knopfler
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
— Juan Ramon Jimenez
I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.
— Jill Scott
What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
— Erica Jong
More modern poetry is written than read.
— P. J. O'Rourke
Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
— Sylvia Plath
Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.
— Robert Pinsky
I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.
— Jessica Steen
When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.
— Douglas Coupland
Maya Angelou was the voice of three generations. Her poetry spanned our journey, chronicled our hearts and documented our struggles as we moved from the orations of Martin Luther King to the presidency of Barack Obama.
— Donna Brazile
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
— William Hazlitt
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
— Richard M. Nixon
I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.
— Jason Mraz
When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.
— Jenny Lewis
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
— Seamus Heaney
No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
— Felix Dennis
What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
— Charles Bukowski
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
— Muhammad Iqbal
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
— Daisaku Ikeda
But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
— Chinua Achebe
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
— Robert Morgan
Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world. 
— Tahar Ben Jelloun
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
— Jay-Z
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
— William Blake
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
— Charles Baudelaire
I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.
— Jordin Sparks
I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
— John Donne
I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.
— Sylvia Plath
How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?
— Maria Montessori
Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.
— Richard Eyre
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.
— Abbas Kiarostami
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
— Emily Dickinson
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
— Gustave Flaubert
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
— John Keats
The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.
— Marcus du Sautoy
Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
— Ivan Turgenev
The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
— Maya Angelou
Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.
— Natalie Merchant
A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
— Karen Armstrong
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
— James Fenton
I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
— Charles Simic
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
— Paul Dirac
The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.
— David Whyte
I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
— Adrian McKinty
I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll.
— Patti Smith
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
— Margaret Walker
Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.
— Simon Callow
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
— Rita Dove
I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
— Naguib Mahfouz
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
— Antonin Artaud
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
— Mary Oliver
It's not easy to define poetry.
— Bob Dylan
I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
— Tom Waits
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
— Wole Soyinka
I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
— Maya Angelou
For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.
— Robert Pinsky
If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
— Philippe Petit
The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine.
— Vanessa Diffenbaugh
I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
— Donald Hall
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
— Mary Oliver
I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.
— Patti Smith
Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.
— Junot Diaz
Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
— Anne Stevenson
Superstition is the poetry of life.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
— Peter Porter
The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
— John Drane
Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes... whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber... they're listening to poetry.
— Maya Angelou
If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.
— Eileen Myles
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
— Andre Gide
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
— Charles Baudelaire
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
— Marianne Moore
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
— Oscar Wilde
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
— Oscar Wilde
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
— Paul Engle
The crown of literature is poetry.
— W. Somerset Maugham
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
— Wallace Stevens
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
— Anne Stevenson
He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.
— John Clare
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
— George Will
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
— Henry R. Luce
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
— Sylvia Plath
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
— Robert Hass