Eugenio Montale Quotes

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.

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.

Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.

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?

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

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.

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

I went down, giving you my arm, at least one million of stairs
and now that you are no more here it's the void on every step.
Also in such way our long journey has been short too.
Mine still goes on, and I need no more
coincidences, reservations,
traps, shames of those who think
that reality is that what you see.
I went down millions of stairs giving you my arm
not just because it's better to see with four eyes than two.
With you I went down because I knew that between us
the only true pupils, though so much darkened,
were yours

L'attesa é lunga,
Il mio sogno de ti non é finito

(The wait is long,
My dream of you is not ended)

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

The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.

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

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

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

Absent one, how I miss you on this shore
that conjures you and fades if you're away

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.

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

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

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

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.