Poets

To begin at the beginning.
—Dylan Thomas
Under Milk Wood

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
—Wislawa Szymborska

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
—Maya Angelou

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n.
—John Milton

Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly what is true.
—John Keats

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's.
I will not reason and compare; My business is to create.
—William Blake

The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, "Here are lions."
—W. B. Yeats

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
—Robert Frost

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work.
—William Butler Yeats

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
—James Russell Lowell

Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 

And I eat men like air.
—Sylvia Plath

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea.
—John Ciardi

In creating, the only hard thing's to begin; 
A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.
—James Russell Lowell

So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated temperature. To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.
—William Blake

Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.
—Maya Angelou

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.
—Dylan Thomas

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
—William Butler Yeats

I've never understood why we should stop considering a mediocre person mediocre merely because he can write.
—Christian Morgenstern

Why does the Muse only speak when she is unhappy? 
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.
—Stevie Smith

Creative evolution is at last becoming conscious.
—e. e. cummings

Hell is a half-filled auditorium. 
—Robert Frost 

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. 
—Paul Valery

If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain't enough!
—Shel Silverstein

Nothing can be created out of nothing.
—Lucretius

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
—Sylvia Plath

Obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get to the office.
—Robert Frost

Be radical, be radical, be radical--be not too damned radical.
—Walt Whitman

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
—William Blake

To ask the hard question is simple.
—W. H. Auden

No bird has ever uttered note
That was not in some first bird's throat;
Since Eden's freshness and man's fall
No rose has been original.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich

If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
—Dylan Thomas

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—T. S. Eliot 32

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