Famous Quotes

"I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity."

Tahar Ben Jelloun on Poetry

More quotes about Poetry

• "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

  T. S. Eliot on Poetry

• "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

• "A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

More quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

• "People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work."

• "Beauty is first and foremost an emotion."

• "I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity."

• "Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price."

• "Emigration is no longer a solution it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open."