Eugenio Montale

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

— Eugenio Montale

“No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.”

— Eugenio Montale

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who…

— Eugenio Montale

Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate…

— Eugenio Montale

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice…

— Eugenio Montale

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

Holidays - Have no pity.

— Eugenio Montale

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries…

— Eugenio Montale

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who…

— Eugenio Montale

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

— Eugenio Montale

The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made…

— Eugenio Montale

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

Bring me then the plant that points to those bright Lucidites swirling up from the earth, And life itself exhaling that central…

— Eugenio Montale

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations…

— Eugenio Montale

The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the…

— Eugenio Montale

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

— Eugenio Montale

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is…

— 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…

— Eugenio Montale

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

— Eugenio Montale

“Absent one, how I miss you on this shore that conjures you and fades if you're away”

— Eugenio Montale