Top 80 Marianne Moore Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.”

— Marianne Moore

52. “We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave.”

— Marianne Moore

53. “Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.”

— Marianne Moore

54. “Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.”

— Marianne Moore

55. “In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.”

— Marianne Moore

56. “Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.”

— Marianne Moore

57. “War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.”

— Marianne Moore

58. “We are suffering from too much sarcasm.”

— Marianne Moore

59. “I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it.”

— Marianne Moore

60. “Poetry is all nouns and verbs.”

— Marianne Moore

61. “Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.”

— Marianne Moore

62. “I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.”

— Marianne Moore

63. “One must be as clear as one’s natural reticence allows one to be.”

— Marianne Moore

64. “The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, “Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul.””

— Marianne Moore

65. “As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.”

— Marianne Moore

66. “The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I’m dissatisfied, I’m Irish.”

— Marianne Moore

67. “Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.”

— Marianne Moore

68. “Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile.”

— Marianne Moore

69. “When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use...”

— Marianne Moore

70. “Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.”

— Marianne Moore

71. “So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths...”

— Marianne Moore

72. “There never was a war that was not inward.”

— Marianne Moore

73. “The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.”

— Marianne Moore

74. “Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal’s skin or its flexibility in motion?”

— Marianne Moore

75. “I never ‘plan’ a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.”

— Marianne Moore

76. “A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.”

— Marianne Moore

77. “Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.”

— Marianne Moore

78. “When we think we don’t like art it is because it is artificial art.”

— Marianne Moore

79. “As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.”

— Marianne Moore

80. “Appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.”

— Marianne Moore

81. “Writing is an undertaking for the modest.”

— Marianne Moore

82. “Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.”

— Marianne Moore

83. “A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.”

— Marianne Moore

84. “There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman; and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.”

— Marianne Moore

85. “Honesty – however dangerous – should be as valuable as radium it seems to me...”

— Marianne Moore

86. “The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don’t want things done for them.”

— Marianne Moore

87. “It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.”

— Marianne Moore

88. “You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.”

— Marianne Moore

89. “So he who strongly feels, behaves.”

— Marianne Moore