Eugenio Montale Quotes

Quotes about:

• Too many lives are needed to make just one.

  Eugenio Montale

  Character, Needed, Just One

  50 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Waiting

  Eugenio Montale, G. Singh (1978). “Selected essays [of] Eugenio Montale”, Carcanet Press

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Running, Moving, Past

  15 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Doors, Wonderful, Terrible

  12 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Art, Reality, Art Is

  24 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Responsibility, Differences, Solitude

  Eugenio Montale (1976). “Poet in our time”, Calder Publications

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Real, Book, Simple

  12 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Communication, Reflection, Solitude

  12 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Art, Dark, Civilization

  9 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Writing, Doe, Poet

  11 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Work, Men, Thinking

  Eugenio Montale (1976). “Poet in our time”, Calder Publications

  9 Copy quote

• 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?

  Eugenio Montale

  Ignorance, Men, Thinking

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Lyric Poetry, Soul, Creation

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Love You, Eye, Light

  10 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Today, Prose, Verses

  13 Copy quote

• Holidays - Have no pity.

  Eugenio Montale

  Holiday, Pity

  Eugenio Montale (1966). “Selected Poems”, p.79, New Directions Publishing

  12 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Art, Two, Musical

  5 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Art, Pieces, Paper

  10 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Book, School, Doe

  10 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Art, Hymns, Becoming

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Believe, Struggle, Two

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Art, Men, Waiting

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Writing, Exercise, Self

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugenio Montale

  Fashion, Fire, Hands

  9 Copy quote

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Cutting, Language, Poetic

  9 Copy quote

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