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Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

— Jorge Luis Borges The Divine Comedy (1977)

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Poetry

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

Borges Verbal (1999)

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

All Jorge Luis Borges quotes →

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