101 verified voices in Literature & poetry · 12 shown here, a fresh sample each day
“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1819)
“Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
“it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1819)
“Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that. My business is circumference.”
— Emily Dickinson, Letters to T. W. Higginson (in 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly) (1862)
“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
“Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
“A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.”
— Emily Dickinson, Poems by Emily Dickinson (ed. Todd & Higginson) (1896)
“That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1892 edition) (1892)
“But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
“He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1817)
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