Eugenio Montale quotes

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity. (Eugenio Montale)
Too many lives are needed to make just one. View quote
Eugenio Montale
I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life. View quote
Eugenio Montale
In reality art is always for everyone and for no one. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose. View quote
Eugenio Montale
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies. View quote
Eugenio Montale
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me. View quote
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. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one. (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. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Eugenio Montale
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know. View quote
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. View quote
Eugenio Montale
The poet does not know and often will never know his true receiver. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
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)
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries. View quote
Eugenio Montale