My verse has brought me no roubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house.

Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.

The love boat has crashed against the everyday.

Our planet is poorly equipped for delight. One must snatch gladness from the days that are. In this life it's not difficult to die. To make life is more difficult by far.

If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: not a man, but a cloud in trousers!

In the church of my heart the choir is on fire

Listen! If stars are lit It means there is someone who needs it, It means someone wants them to be, That someone deems those specks of spit Magnificent!

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain.

Gentle souls! You play your love on the violin. The crude ones play it on the drums violently. But can you turn yourselves inside out, like me And become just two lips entirely?

On the pavement of my trampled soul the steps of madmen weave the prints of rude crude words.

But I, from poetry's skies, plunge into communism, because without it I feel no love.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things. You have always been full and perfect, so you had nothing to make up for.

Just sharing one little smile can change someone's whole world.

Happiness at any price is no happiness at all.

I have fought against spending. I have fought against special interests. I have fought for reform.

As the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger

The common man is impelled and controlled by interests; the superior, by ideas.

During my youth, I was fascinated by the colors of Van Goth's paintings

Love is a verb, not a noun. It is active. Love is not just feelings of passion and romance. It is behavior.

Of all human lamentations, without doubt, the most common is if only I had known. But we can't know, and so days of death and fire so often begin no differently than those of love and warmth.