Top 50 John Ciardi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The day will happen whether or not you get up.”

— John Ciardi

2. “Patience is the art of caring slowly.”

— John Ciardi

3. “The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.”

— John Ciardi

4. “Let our love be like an arch- two weaknesses leaning together to form one strength.”

— John Ciardi

5. “Early to bed and early to rise probably indicates unskilled labor.”

— John Ciardi

6. “A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.”

— John Ciardi

7. “There’s nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.”

— John Ciardi

8. “Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.”

— John Ciardi

9. “Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.”

— John Ciardi

10. “Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.”

— John Ciardi

11. “I’m smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.”

— John Ciardi

12. “Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.”

— John Ciardi

13. “Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.”

— John Ciardi

14. “A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.”

— John Ciardi

15. “You don’t have to suffer to be a poet.”

— John Ciardi

16. “A good question is never answered.”

— John Ciardi

17. “At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.”

— John Ciardi

18. “Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.”

— John Ciardi

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19. “Translator’s Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same “music”, the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.”

— John Ciardi

20. “The public library is the most dangerous place in town.”

— John Ciardi

21. “You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”

— John Ciardi

22. “A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.”

— John Ciardi

23. “A man is what he does with his attention and mine is not for sale.”

— John Ciardi

24. “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.”

— John Ciardi

25. “Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.”

— John Ciardi

26. “Good writing tends to present evidence rather than judgments. When the evidence is well presented, the reader’s judgments will agree with those implicit in the writing. But nothing is more disastrous to the communication between writer and reader than a series of implicit judgments with which the reader cannot agree or which he finds to be simply silly or for which he is given no evidence he can respect.”

— John Ciardi

27. “Nothing goes further toward a man’s liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.”

— John Ciardi

28. “The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.”

— John Ciardi

29. “Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what’s possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.”

— John Ciardi

30. “Poetry lies its way to the truth.”

— John Ciardi

31. “Men marry what they need. I marry you.”

— John Ciardi

32. “A dollar saved is a quarter earned.”

— John Ciardi

33. “I have one head that wants to be good, And one that wants to be bad. And always, as soon as I get up, One of my heads is sad.”

— John Ciardi

34. “You have to fall in love with hanging around words.”

— John Ciardi

35. “The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.”

— John Ciardi

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36. “If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.”

— John Ciardi

37. “A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.”

— John Ciardi

38. “Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we’re not free spenders- doesn’t know our like.”

— John Ciardi

39. “The constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.”

— John Ciardi

40. “The thing about cats as you might find, is that no one knows what they have in mind.”

— John Ciardi

41. “Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.”

— John Ciardi

42. “Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.”

— John Ciardi

43. “It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their conviction. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their convictions.”

— John Ciardi

44. “Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.”

— John Ciardi

45. “Poetry is man’s best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.”

— John Ciardi

46. “What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.”

— John Ciardi

47. “A man is what he does with his attention.”

— John Ciardi

48. “To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.”

— John Ciardi

49. “Boys are the cash of war.”

— John Ciardi

50. “Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!”

— John Ciardi

Featured in: Fun Quotes