Quote

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

Eugenio Montale

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eugenio Montale
Age: 85 †
Born: 1896
Born: January 12
Died: 1981
Died: September 12
Editor
Journalist
Librarian
Literary Critic
Music Critic
Poet
Politician
Prosaist
Translator
Genova
Italy
Life
Enigma
Knocked
Door
Doors
Terrible
Wonderful
Always

More quotes by Eugenio Montale

Image
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
Image
Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.
Eugenio Montale
Image
Holidays - Have no pity.
Eugenio Montale
Image
Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.
Eugenio Montale
Image
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
Image
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
Eugenio Montale
Image
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
Image
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.
Eugenio Montale
Image
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
Image
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
Image
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
Eugenio Montale
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
Eugenio Montale