Timeless Inspiration: A Curated Collection of Poetic Quotes to Uplift Your Spirit

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

- Robert Frost

"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

- William Shakespeare

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."

- William Wordsworth

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things."

- Mary Oliver

"Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own."

- Dylan Thomas

"I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul."

- Pablo Neruda

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."

- Pablo Neruda

"The only journey is the one within."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."

- E.E. Cummings

"Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life."

- Omar Khayyam

"I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart) ... and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)"

- E.E. Cummings

"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering."

- Ben Okri

"'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

- T. S. Eliot

"Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that."

- Mary Oliver

"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice."

- Robert Frost

"Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings."

- Umberto Eco

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."

- E.E. Cummings

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

- Mary Oliver

"Prose = words in their best order; Poetry = the best words in the best order"

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue."

- Pablo Neruda

"Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light."

- Dylan Thomas

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

- Robert Frost

"Poetry: the best words in the best order."

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day."

- Dylan Thomas

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do."

- Steve Jobs

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

- George Eliot

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

- Rumi

"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals."

- Zig Ziglar

"I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions."

- Stephen R. Covey

"The only impossible journey is the one you never begin."

- Anthony Robbins

"In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on."

- Robert Frost

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

- Albert Einstein

"Believe you can and you’re halfway there."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."

- Winston Churchill

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."

- Peter Drucker

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do."

- Rumi

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."

- Langston Hughes

"They can conquer who believe they can."

- Virgil

"And still, after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky."

- Hafiz

"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."

- Rumi

"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all."

- Emily Dickinson

"The wound is the place where the light enters you."

- Rumi

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

- Oscar Wilde

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul."

- William Ernest Henley

"I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)."

- E.E. Cummings

"The only limits that exist are the ones you place on yourself."

- Dr. Wayne Dyer

"What matters most is how well you walk through the fire."

- Charles Bukowski

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."

- E. E. Cummings

"Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be."

- Khalil Gibran

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

- T.S. Eliot

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

- Maya Angelou

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

- Albert Einstein

"The only way to achieve the impossible is to believe it is possible."

- Charles Kingsleigh

"Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going."

- Sam Levenson

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."

- Sylvia Plath

"Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future."

- William Wordsworth

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

- John Donne

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

- Robert Browning

"What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life."

- Walt Whitman

"Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."

- Thomas Gray

"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity."

- Henry Van Dyke

"We do not remember days, we remember moments."

- Cesare Pavese

"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem."

- David Carradine

"True love cannot be found where it does not exist, nor can it be denied where it does."

- Torquato Tasso

"Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary."

- Khalil Gibran

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

- Lucille Clifton

"Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along."

- George Herbert

"O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

- Wendell Berry

"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."

- Audre Lorde

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."

- Muhammad Ali

"The greatest pleasure of life is love."

- Euripides

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you."

- Joseph Joubert

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

- Leonard Cohen

"I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me."

- Amanda Gorman

"I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating."

- Sophocles

"There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love."

- Lord Byron

"Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained."

- Seamus Heaney

"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."

- Wallace Stevens

"The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"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. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

"Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

- Sarah Williams

"We love the things we love for what they are."

- Robert Frost

"Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favour"

- Robert Frost

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet."

- Plato

"I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

- Galileo

"Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate And though I oft have passed them by A day will come at last when I Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."

- Sylvia Plath

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

- Robert Frost

"If you are a dreamer come in If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer If youre a pretender com sit by my fire For we have some flax golden tales to spin Come in! Come in!"

- Shel Silverstein

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."

- Emily Dickinson

"Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air."

- Carl Sandburg

"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

- Aeschylus

"The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something."

- Muhammad Iqbal

"I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else."

- John Keats

"Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts."

- Nikki Giovanni

"In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love."

- J.M. Coetzee

"A picture is a poem without words."

- Horace

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

- Carl Sandburg

"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks."

- Plutarch

"Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage."

- Charles Dickens

"Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis."

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Robert Frost

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."

- Dante Alighieri

"No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand."

- Bertolt Brecht

"When words leave off, music begins."

- Heinrich Heine

"If you want to be loved, be lovable."

- Ovid

"Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life."

- Eavan Boland

"Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws, and asks no omen, but his country's cause."

- Homer

"Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!"

- Robert Burns

"Beware the fury of a patient man."

- John Dryden

"Time and tide wait for no man."

- Geoffrey Chaucer

"I will not play tug o' war. I'd rather play hug o' war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins."

- Shel Silverstein

"Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."

- Marianne Moore

"We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know."

- W. H. Auden

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry."

- Cassandra Clare

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"

- Victor Hugo

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."

- Kahlil Gibran

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness."

- Kahlil Gibran

"She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."

- Neil Gaiman

"Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."

- John Boyle O'Reilly

"Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends."

- William Butler Yeats

"Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night."

- William Blake

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."

- Oscar Wilde

"One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist, or, worse, a poet."

- Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladwell

"If you're reading this... Congratulations, you're alive. If that's not something to smile about, then I don't know what is."

- Chad Sugg

"Society is now one polish'd horde, form'd of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored"

- Lord Byron

"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg."

- Samuel Butler

"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."

- E. E. Cummings

"I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything."

- Steven Wright

"To Autumn: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness"

- John Keats

"Love is the poetry of the senses."