Eugenio Montale quotes

Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, essayist, and translator, regarded as one of the greatest Italian literary figures of the twentieth century. His poetry explored themes of existential despair, nature, and the complexities of modern life. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and is remembered for his profound influence on European poetry. Here are 28 of his quotes:

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

Eugenio Montale

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

Eugenio Montale

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

Eugenio Montale

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Eugenio Montale

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

Eugenio Montale

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

Eugenio Montale

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

Eugenio Montale

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

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

Eugenio Montale

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.

Eugenio Montale

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

Eugenio Montale

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

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

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

Eugenio Montale

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.

Eugenio Montale

The poet does not know and often will never know his true receiver.

Eugenio Montale

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

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.

Eugenio Montale

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Eugenio Montale

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

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

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

Eugenio Montale