"The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority."

Poetry, Beauty, Meaning, Language

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"The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority."

Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Poetry, Movement, Memory, Time

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Poet

Poetry,

"I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Poetry, Sound, Words, Movement

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

Karl Schlegel, German Philosopher

Poetry, Women

"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

Robert Frost, American Poet

Poetry, Nature, Metaphor, Life

"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Poetry, Creativity, Identity, Words

"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry."

Emily Dickinson, American Poet

Poetry,

"Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Prayer, Darkness, Choice, Hope

"The words of the true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, & everything else, they balance the ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, they do not seek beauty, they are sought, forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, they bring none of his or her terminus or to be content & full, whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of the stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings & never be quiet again."

Walt Whitman, American Poet

Poetry, Inspirational, Art, Life

"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep."

Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish Writer

Poetry, Death, Peace, Rest, Eternity

Explore more quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

"As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope."

Imagination

"Life rises out of death, death rises out of life, in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars."

Existence

"The unknown...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

Philosophy

"It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end."

End

"We live well in the houses, well enough, but we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars. Now, we dare not go 100 miles from home. We keep a little knowledge and do nothing with it, but once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life."

Future

"The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so."

Children

"I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."

Happiness

"What good is power when you're too wise to use it?"

Philosophy

"Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known."

Dreams

"He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object."

Psychology