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Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley Julian and Maddalo (1819)

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Poetry

More quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?

Love's Philosophy (1819)

The king ...
like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts, and lives
Just as his father did; the unconquered powers
Of precedent and custom interpose
Between a king and virtue.

Queen Mab (1813)

Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.

Queen Mab (1813)

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

The lone couch of his everlasting sleep.

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