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"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?"
"Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes."

— Jack London Martin Eden (1909)

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Poetry

More quotes by Jack London

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior (1991)

Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

White Fang (1906)

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jack London (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.