Status Updates From Der Club der toten Dichter

“Don't limit poetry to the word. Poetry can be found in music, a photograph, in the way a meal is prepared, anything with the stuff of revelation in it. It can exist in the most everyday things but it must never, never be ordinary.”

“Plato, a gifted man like myself, once said, 'Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator.'”

“And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.
We in the ages lying,
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth.”

"We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lonely sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World losers and world forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world, forever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up with world's great cities,”

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

" ’I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life!' "

Not artists .. Free thinkers.

Not a cynic .. A realist.

“One reads poetry because he is a member of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion!
Medicine, law, banking-these are necessary to sustain life. But poetry, romance, love, beauty?
These are what we stay alive for!”

“words and ideas have the power to change the world.”

"This is battle, boys," he cried. "War! You are souls at a critical juncture. Either you will succumb to the will of academic hoi polloi, and the fruit will die on the vine—or you will triumph as individuals.”

“A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great.”

“Once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.”

“To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance.”

"Crape Diem," Keating whispered loudly. "𝐒𝐞𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲. 𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐲."

The boys were quiet, some of them leaned hesitantly toward the photographs.

“Most of those gentlemen are fertilizing 𝐝𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐥𝐬 now! However, if you get very close, boys, you can hear them whisper. 𝐆𝐨 𝐚𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝," he urged,"𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧. 𝐆𝐨 𝐨𝐧. Hear it? Can you?"

"Did most of them not wait until it was too late before making their lives into even one iota of what they were capable? In chasing the almighty deity of 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬, did they not squander their 𝐛𝐨𝐲𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬?“