Quotes from Eugenio Montale

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

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

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.

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.

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.

E andando nel sole che abbaglia sentire con triste meraviglia com'è tutta la vita e il suo travaglio in questo seguitare una muraglia che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.

Eppure resta che qualcosa è accaduto, forse un niente che è tutto.

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

L'attesa é lunga, Il mio sogno de ti non é finito (The wait is long, My dream of you is not ended)

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

Your speech so halting and unguarded is the only thing left with which to content myself. But the accent is changed, the colour is different.

Occorrono troppe vite per farne una.

Difficile è credere che sia un dono la vita, quando si trascina una stanca esistenza e il vivere d'ora in ora ci tortura; ma anche nei tuoi occhi vedo brume di dolore. Hanno già flagellato il tuo giovane cuore? E rispose per te il mare e un' ombra lieve di cormorano. Tacevi e sogguardavi mesta l'orizzonte estremo.

No medical student relishes the idea of having to learn a subject over and over again.