Top 15 Eugenio Montale Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

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

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

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

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.

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

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?

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