All Quotes

433 quotes in total

“There is something within me that might be illusion as it is often case with young delighted people, but if I would be fortunate to achieve some of my ideals, it would be on the behalf of the whole of humanity. If those hopes would become fulfilled, the most exciting thought would be that it is a deed of a Serb. Address at the Belgrade train station”

“There can be no society without poetry , but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot. "Signs in Rotation" (1967) in The Bow and the Lyre : The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History (1973) as translated by Ruth L.C. Simms, p. 249”

“Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry . Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun. Nobel Lecture”

“Oda a la Bella Desnuda (Ode to a Beautiful Nude) , from Nuevas Odas Elementales (1956), trans. Nathaniel Tarn in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0”

“Y algo golpeaba en mi alma, fiebre o alas perdidas, y me fui haciendo solo, descifrando aquella quemadura y escribí la primera línea vaga, vaga, sin cuerpo, pura, tontería pura sabiduría del que no sabe nada, y vi de pronto el cielo desgranado y abierto. And something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire, and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and I suddenly saw the heavens unfastened and open.”

“Religión en el Este (Religion in the East) from Memorial of Isla Negra [ Memorial de Isla Negra ] (1964), trans. by Anthony Kerrigan in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0”

“Es la hora, amor mío, de apartar esta rosa sombría, cerrar las estrellas, enterrar la ceniza en la tierra: y, en la insurrección de la luz, despertar con los que despertaron o seguir en el sueño alcanzando la otra orilla del mar que no tiene otra orilla. It is time, love, to break off that sombre rose, shut up the stars and bury the ash in the earth; and, in the rising of the light, wake with those who awoke or go on in the dream, reaching the other shore of the sea which has no other shore.”

“Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano. Only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind. In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.”