This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination." - Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
"Virginity is the poetry, not the reality of life." - Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
"Half the noblest passages in poetry are truisms; but these truism are the great truths of humanity; and he is the true poet who draws them from their fountains in elemental purity, and gives us a drink." - Letitia Elizabeth Landon
"The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life." - Barry Lopez, fully Barry Holstun Lopez
"Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: "What is it good for?' a question which would abolish the rose, and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage." - James Russell Lowell
"Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls." - James Russell Lowell
"Japanese poetry has as its subject the human heart. It may seem to be of no practical use and just as well left uncomposed, but when one knows poetry well, one understands also without explanation the reasons governing order and disorder in the world." - Kamo no Mabuci
"This divination of the spiritual in the things of sense, and which expresses itself I the things of sense, is precisely what we call Poetry. Metaphysics too pursues a spiritual prey, but in a very different formal object. Whereas metaphysics stands in the line of knowledge and of the contemplation of truth, poetry stands in the line of making and of the delight procured by beauty. The difference is an all-important one, and one that it would be harmful to disregard. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence... Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order. Metaphysics isolates mystery in order to know it; poetry, thanks to the balances it constructs, handles and utilizes mystery as an unknown force." - Jacques Maritain
"Nine-tenths of the best poetry of the world has been written by poets less than thirty years old; a great deal more than half of it has been written by poets under twenty-five." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"[The earth] is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love." - Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart
"Painting is silent poetry, poetry painting that speaks." - Simonides, aka Simonedes of Ceos NULL
"All men have poetry in their hearts, and it is necessary for them, as much as possible, to express their feelings. For this they must have a medium, moving and pliant, which can refreshingly become their own, age after age. All great languages undergo change. Those languages which resist the spirit of change are doomed and will never produce great harvests of thought and literature. When forms become fixed, the spirit either weakly accepts its imprisonment or rebels. All revolutions consists of the “within” fighting against invasion from “without”... All great human movements are related to some great idea." -
"Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation; and our attitude toward the Infinite Being must also in its expression have a variety of individuality ceaseless and unending. Those sects which jealously build their boundaries with too rigid creeds excluding all spontaneous movement of the living spirit may hoard their theology but they kill religion." -
"The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets." - Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
"Workers need poetry more than bread. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry." - Simone Weil
"Poetry is the intellect colored by feelings." - Alexander Wilson
"There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more - there is action. The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look; it is the embodiment of the sentiment of actual help." - Octavius Winslow
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." - William Wordsworth
"There may be enough poetry in the whir of our machines so that our machine age will become immortal." - Owen D. Young
"Whenever the hidden, the unfathomable, is experienced whenever the meaning of all things is felt and grasped, then it is ether the devoutness of silence, that most intimate feeling of the living God, that deepest force of religious intuition and emotion, which takes hold of man, or, again, it is the uplift to imagery which is stirred up within him, the poetry which sings in prayer of the ineffable." - Leo Baeck
"To me it seems as if when god conceived the world, that was poetry; He formed it, and that was sculpture; He colored it, and that was painting; He peopled it with living things, and that was the grand, divine eternal Drama." - David Belasco
"Poetry creates an abstract world using concrete materials – just like life itself." - Asaf Halet Çelebi
"If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"Lowering consumption need not deprive people of goods and services that really matter. To the contrary, life’ most meaningful and pleasant activities are often paragons of environmental virtue. The preponderance of things that people name as their most rewarding pastimes are infinitely sustainable. Religious practice, conversation, family and community gatherings, theater, music, dance, literature, sports, poetry, artistic and creative pursuits, education, and appreciation of nature all fit readily into a culture of permanence – a way of life that can endure through countless generations." - Alan Thein Durning
"Poetry transcends logic as the spiritual transcends the physical and intellectual. It reveals life eternally and the instruments of time are too mean to record its mystery." - Hugh I’Anson Fausset
"Poetry even at its purest is not prayer; but it rises from the same depths as the need to pray." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"Sciences sees signs; Poetry, the thing signified." - J. C. Hare (1795-1855) and A. W. Hare
"Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life." - Josephine Hart, Lady Saatchi
"Poetry will not save the world. But poetry can force the soul into the precincts of its last evasion." - Stanley Hopper, fully Stanley Romaine Hopper
"Faith is the song of life. Woe to him who wishes to rob life of its splendid poetry. The whole mass of prosaic literature and knowledge is of value only when it is founded on the perception of the poetry of life." - Abraham Isaac Kook
"Poetry is an impassioned testament to man’s inner freedom." - Shiv Kumar, now Shiv Kumar Batalvi
"Happiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight or recite poetry among the blossoms." - Ding Ling, pseudonym of Jiǎng Bīngzhī, aka Bīn Zhǐ
"Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe." - Thomas Merton
"In poetry everything is permitted. With only one condition, of course: you must improve upon the blank page." - Nicanor Parra, bully Nicanor Parra Sandoval
"Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance." - M. C. Richards, fully Mary Caroline Richards
"All perishes, only poetry remains." - Nguyễn Chí Thiện,, given name Chi Thien
"Resistance to empiricism is also due to a purely emotional shortcoming of the mode of reasoning it promotes: It is bloodless. People need more than reason. They need the poetry of affirmation; they crave an authority greater than themselves at rites of passage and other moments of high seriousness. A majority desperately wish for the immortality the rituals seem to underwrite." -
"All good poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." - William Wordsworth
"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." - William Wordsworth
"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." - Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
"From Apollonian law to Dionysian spirit, prose to poetry, left cortical hemisphere to right, the line between the two domains [or cultures] can be easily crossed back and forth, but no one knows how to translate the tongue of one into that of the other. Should we even try? I believe so, and for the best of reasons: the goal is both important and attainable." -