Poetry Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
In terms of freedom, America doesn't invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky
Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.
Quote by -Joseph Brodsky