Henry David Thoreau Quotes

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?

Art is great. At its best, it engages the intellect and challenges the spirit; it connects us across history and reminds us of our humanity.

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Eloquence the soul, song charms the senses.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

... does it seem to you that it is possible to speak of Art? It would be the same as explaining love!

Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Tis the privilege of Art Thus to play its cheerful part, Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate.

Without art there is no hope.