Eugenio Montale Quotes

No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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”

— Eugenio Montale

“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.”

— Eugenio Montale

“Perhaps One Morning Walking
(Forse un mattino andando in un'aria di vetro)
Perhaps one morning walking in dry glassy air,
I will turn, I will see the miracle complete:
nothingness at my shoulder, the void behind
me, with a drunkard's terror.
Then, as on a screen, trees houses hills
will advance swiftly in familiar illusion,
But it will be too late; and I will return, silently,
to men who do not look back, with my secret.”

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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

“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

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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

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

— Eugenio Montale

“Too many lives are needed to make just one.”

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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.”

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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

“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

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

“Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.”

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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

“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.”

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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

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

— Eugenio Montale

“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.”

— Eugenio Montale

“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.”

— Eugenio Montale

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

“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

“Holidays - Have no pity.”

— Eugenio Montale