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Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

— Jeremy Bentham Life of John Stuart Mill (1954)

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Poetry

More quotes by Jeremy Bentham

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)

Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove.

Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth — that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?

Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811)

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)

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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: Jeremy Bentham (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.