David Whyte Quotes

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.

Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.

Therefore, the two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

We are surrounded by poetry on all sides.

Poetry is the eloquence of verse.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

A poet is a painter of the soul.

Language is the machine of the poet.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry

Why then we should drop into poetry.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.