17 verified voices in Literature & poetry · 12 shown here, a fresh sample each day
“Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
“For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply.”
— William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) (1800)
“Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
“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)
“if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1818)
“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
“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)
“Memory should not be called Knowledge—Many have original minds who do not think it—they are led away by Custom.”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1818)
“there is no limit to the horizon, and that nothing—no "method", no experiment, even of the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
“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)
Every quote in this collection was verified
against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it
truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
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