Poetry Quote by Lewis Carroll — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

“One! two! and through and through”

“have i gone mad?”

“Why it's simply impassible!”

“You're thinking about something, and it makes you forget to talk.”

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'”

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.”

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

“I see your picture and in that picture I didn't see you.”

“I searched for my own heart”

“Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”