Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Stand a little less between me and the sun.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

A yawn is a silent shout.

Language is the dress of thought.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

I am in the world feeling my way to light ‚amid the encircling gloom.‘

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it’s poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that’s a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!