Yehuda Amichai quotes

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time. (Yehuda Amichai)

I was a very religious child - I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good - I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.

Yehuda Amichai

The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.

Yehuda Amichai

And what will you do now? You'll collect loves Like stamps. You've got doubles and no one Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.

Yehuda Amichai

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

Yehuda Amichai

And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.

Yehuda Amichai

I think the end is endless. It's either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it's totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn't understand it.

Yehuda Amichai

Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself without anyone noticing.

Yehuda Amichai

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

Yehuda Amichai

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Yehuda Amichai

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet. (Yehuda Amichai)

Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

Yehuda Amichai