Eugenio Montale Quotes

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

Holidays - Have no pity.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men; and it is the only one that rules the world.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.

E andando nel sole che abbagliasentire con triste meravigliacom'è tutta la vita e il suo travaglioin questo seguitare una muragliache ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.