Eugenio Montale Quotations

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

Holidays - Have no pity.

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

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.

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.