62 Beautiful Poetry Snippets to Stir Your Soul

I, off and on, take out my old, messy notebooks and diaries filled with beautiful verses, words, quotes, and lines that capture my heart.

Those scribbled notes comfort me and bring me peace, as if each word knew exactly what my heart needs. Now, they’re right here with me on my computer table.

I have another reason to open them daily: I now have a blog to share these treasures with fellow word lovers.

Here are some snippets from my collection, shared with the hope that they’ll touch your heart just as much as mine.

hang on

keep your silence

until the words

ripen in you

~ Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

~ Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

there is you and you.

this is a relationship.

this is the most important relationship.

~ nayyirah waheed, home, salt

and i said to my body.

softly.

‘i want to be your friend.’

it took a long breath.

and replied

‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.’

~ nayyirah waheed

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

~ Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

~ Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Life's battles don't always go

To the stronger or faster man,

But soon or late the man who wins

Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!

~  Walter D. Wintle, Thinking

Loving someone who hates

themselves

is a special kind of violence.

A fight inside the bones.

A war within the blood.

~ Yrsa Daley-Ward, battle, bone

Every time I travel

I meet myself a little more.

~  Yrsa Daley-Ward, coordinates, bone

Someone I loved once gave me a

box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand that this too,

was a gift.

~ Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

On the day you were born,

I said “daughter”,

like Alaska says “sun”.

~ Andrea Gibson

We wear our traumas

the way the guillotine

wears gravity.

Our lovers' necks

are so soft.

~ Andrea Gibson, Gravity

Love stole my prayer beads and gave me poetry and song.

~ Rumi

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
|
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

~ Rudyard Kipling, If—

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

~ William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I asked the saint at the tavern, what

is the secret to life?

He asked for a drink and said: “Not

revealing anyone’s flaws.”

~ Hafiz

Nostalgia is a dirty liar that insists things were better than they seemed.

~ Michelle K

My body is an argument I did not start.

In a way I am not aware who made me.

~ Morgan Parker, And Cold Suset, Magical Negro

Travel and tell no one,

live a true love story and tell no one,

live happily and tell no one,

people ruin beautiful things.

~ Kahlil Gibran

I've always found that home is simply a matter of carrying it with you.

~ feather down soul

you need

chaos

in your soul

to give birth to

a dancing

star.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I almost wish we were

butterflies and liv'd but

three summer days -

three such days with you I

could fill with more delight

than fifty common years

could ever contain.

~ John Keats, Bright Star

If you love

a woman in

her coming

together, and

her falling

apart, then

you have

learned

the world. You

have learned

art.

~ Erin Van Vuren

i carry your

heart with me

(i carry it in my heart)

~ e.e.cummings

so

I

let them

have

their

little

victories

which

they need

far

more

than

I

do.

~ Charles Bukowski

'no'

might make them angry.

but

it will make you free.

— if no one has ever told you, your freedom is
more important than their anger

~ nayyirah waheed

I feel like a part of my soul loved you since the beginning of everything.

Maybe we're from the same star.

~ Emery Allen

What should I be but just what I am?

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay, Aria Da Capo; AND A Few Figs From Thistles

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

I've learned that people

will forget what you said,

people will forget what you did,

but people will never forget

how you made them feel.

~ Maya Angelou

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

~ Maya Angelou

What is poetry?

To see a world in

a grain of sand

And heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in

the palm of your

hand

and eternity in an

hour.

~ William Blake

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

~ W. B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size   

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

I say,

It’s in the reach of my arms,

The span of my hips,   

The stride of my step,   

The curl of my lips.   

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,   

That’s me.

~ Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman

Who will believe my verse in time to come,

If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?

Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb

Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.

~ William Shakespeare, Sonnet 17

I throw my passport into the sea,

And name you my country,

I throw all my dictionaries in the fire,

And name you my language.

~ Nizar Qabbani

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

~ Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

how is it so easy for you

to be kind to people he asked

milk and honey dripped

from my lips as i answered

cause people have not

been kind to me.

~ rupi kaur, milk and honey

i will never have

this version of me again

let me slow down

and be with her

~ rupi kaur, always evolving

In the end,

we'll all become stories.

~ Margaret Atwood

my mother sacrificed her dreams

so i could dream

~ rupi kaur, milk and honey

so many gods, so many creeds;

so many paths that wind and wind

while just the art of being kind

is all the sad world needs

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

You glow in my heart

Like the flames of uncounted candles.

But when I go to warm my hands,

My clumsiness overturns the light,

And then I stumble

Against the tables and chairs.

~ Amy Lowell

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

~ Emily Dickinson

You are damaged and broken and unhinged. But so are shooting stars and comets.

~ Nikita Gill

Some days

I am more wolf

than woman

and I am still learning

how to stop apologising

for my wild.

~ Nikita Gill

Take every single person who lessened your shine and bury their memory,

without mercy under glow of everything that makes you who you are.

And who you are right now,

in this moment,

is a living, breathing example of  how you can survive hell and still,

still keep shining.

~ Nikita Gill, You Are Hope In A Human Being

Perhaps when we find

Ourselves wanting everything,

it is because we are dangerously

close to wanting nothing.

~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I am not cruel, only truthful‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

~ Sylvia Plath, Mirror

I can never read all the books I want;

I can never be all the people I want

and live all the lives I want.

I can never train myself in all the skills I want.

And why do I want?

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of

mental and physical experience possible in my life.

And I am horribly limited.

~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

we will never work,

You and I --

you are a star gazer

and i

am the sky;

you will look right at me

and not see a thing...

because,

while you

are looking for shiny objects, i am the spaces in between...

~ Erin Hanson

Every year I manage to live on this earth

I collect more questions than answers.

~  Fatimah Asghar, If They Come for Us

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.

Who shall say where the one ends,

and where the other begins?

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Courage is the muscle

we use when we speak,

if we’re being talked over

and told we’re too weak.

~ Salena Godden

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

~ T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Self-love is an ocean

and your heart is a vessel. Make it full,

and any excess will spill over

into the lives of the people

you hold dear. But you must come first.

~ Beau Taplin, Self Love

she was powerful

not because she

wasn't scared but

because she went on so strongly

despite the fear

~ atticus

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life

Let the poems have you

like the relief

of answered prayer.

~ Raquel Franco

Take Back Your Power

Greet the world with no expectation.

Love as though you have never been hurt or betrayed.

Let go of the ones who take so much from you

yet offer nothing in return.

This is how you take back your power.

~ Lang Leav, Sea of Strangers

Instead of asking

why they left,

now i ask,

what beauty will i create

in the space they no longer

occupy?

~ Rudy Francisco

In the end, poetry is like a gentle whisper amid life’s chaos. It speaks to the heart in ways that nothing else can. These little snippets remind us to pause, feel, connect, and reset the emotions that make us human.

Let These Heartfelt Words Linger, Pin This Post To Keep The Poetry Close At Heart