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.More Eugenio Montale [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.More Eugenio Montale [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

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.More Eugenio Montale [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:54]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:01]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:08]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:32]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:38]

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:45]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:51]

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:58]

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:04]

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?More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:11]

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:17]

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:39]

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:44]

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:50]

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:57]

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:03]

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:09]

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:23]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:32]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:44]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:52]

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.More Eugenio Montale [07/27/2011 07:07:02]