Tao Te Ching
Poetry
Words powerfully influence our lives and yet we so often take them for granted throwing them off into the world with little or no thought. Poetry reverses that tendency mixing words with contemplation, time, and insight. Poets easily become our prophets, iconoclastic smashers of conventional mind, status quo view, and animal-realm ignorance. Corrupt societies ridicule and condemn their poets; sane, healthy, and enlightened ones give them honor and respect.
Quotes (80)
“My poem is done, I laugh and my delight is vaster than the sea.
Oh deathless poetry! The songs of Chu-ping are ever glorious as the sun and moon.
While the palaces and towers of the Chu kings have vanished from the hills.”
“Poetry, philosophy, and science are 3 different manifestations of the same spiritual force searching for the solution to the riddle of existence; science looking from the physical point of view, philosophy from the mental side, and poetry trying to penetrate the mystery with its vision.”
“Poetry, philosophy, and science are 3 different manifestations of the same spiritual force searching for the solution to the riddle of existence; science looking from the physical point of view, philosophy from the mental side, and poetry trying to penetrate the mystery with its vision.”
“Great poets show how the sacred fire of Venus may be made to burn in the coldest breast.”
“It's not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It's those who write the songs.”
“Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.”
“When you understand that my poems aren’t really poems, then we can talk poetry together.”
“Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.”
“The poet brings the whole soul of a man into activity, diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends each into each by that magical power we call imagination.”
“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth, at once the center and circumference of knowledge. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted... it awakens and enlarges the mind lifting the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”
“The poetic mind has no self, no character, no identity; it is every thing and nothing, continually filling some other Body: The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women”
“poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected.”
“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.”
“In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares.”
“The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.”
“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”
“Shakespeare is not only no genius but is not even 'an average author'... his words have nothing in common with art and poetry.”
“I was completely ignorant of the poetry of Poe; it is admirable, it is poetry itself, the dream, and how one feels that you have translated its soul! I knew only Poe's prose, which I had read and admired very young before I had heard it spoken of, but how the poems complete and express the man he was.”
“the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.”
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
“Of our conflicts with others, we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves, we make poetry.”
“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”
“The true spirit of delight, the exultation—the sense of being more than Man—is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”
“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.”
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.”
“Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.”
“When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.”
“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?” “What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice… what could be more secret, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers?”
“The ear is the antechamber to the soul and poetry can adulterate more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet’s then is the highest office of all, His words reach where others fall short”
“the great secret: that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song.”
“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.”
“Love—unknown to primitive men, or only as a hunger of the flesh—has flowered into a magnificent garden of song and sentiment, in which the passion of a man for a maid, though vigorously rooted in physical need, rises like incense into the realm of living poetry.”
“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.”
“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”
“We all derive from the same source… We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — John the Savage”
“Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”
“To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what a myth does for you.”
“Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience.”
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”
“There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.”
“Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.”
“If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page... It doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings...”
“the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the the first-class are formidable... Used with moderation, a first-class verse is an excellent and usually fast-working form of heat therapy.”
“It is the paradox of every poet to have to transcend the logical function of language through language... Because paradox is the principal mode of Lao Tzu's thought processes, it is the nature of Chinese language, especially ancient Chinese, to be poetic.”
“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper... If the cloud in not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.”
“Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the making of the real and is concrete... Poetes cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die, it kills.”
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
“Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.”
“Poetics also includes one's vision, hearing, and feeling altogether... When we talk about poets and poetics, we are talking in terms of expressing ourselves so thoroughly, so precisely, that we don't just mumble our words, mumble our minds, mumble our bodies.”
“If words are of any use at all, they are the words of the poet. For poetry has the ability to point us toward the truth, then stand aside.”
“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.”
“Just as a great poet can use one scene to bring another new, unknown vista into view… the best metaphors make the best poems… filled with hidden possibilities that only the finest metaphors can bring to the surface.”
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