Osip Mandelstam Quotes

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

The French Revolution ended when the spirit of Classical vengeance abandoned it. The Revolution had reduced the priesthood to ashes, destroyed social determinism, and brought the secularization of Europe to its ultimate conclusion. It was then washed up on the shore of the nineteenth century as an already unfathomable thing, not as a Gorgon's head, but as a fascicle of seaweed. Out of the union of mind and the furies a mongrel was born, equally alien to the high rationalism of the Encyclopedia and to the Classical raging of the revolutionary storm-Romanticism. Nevertheless, as it developed, the nineteenth century moved much further away from its predecessor than Romanticism. The nineteenth century was the conduit of Buddhist influence in European culture.

Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution

Every book should be an incentive to studying the language. Every book should provide at least some contact with the original, for example, a parallel text and a glossary. At present we are struggling to take the translation business away from the caste leader, for whom the mass reader is a fiction, an "easy mark" ignorant of foreign languages.

a taste for historical reincarnation and total understanding is not constant; it is a transient taste. And our century has begun under the sign of great intolerance, exclusiveness, and conscious noncomprehension of other worlds.

One question conditions the dynamics and balance of color in the composition of a painting: whence the source of light?

the poet has no fear of recurrence and is easily intoxicated on Classical wine.

the word wanders freely around the thing, like the soul around an abandoned, but not forgotten body.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface. There are epochs, however, when mankind, not satisfied with the present, yearning like the ploughman for the abyssal strata of time, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably leads to Classicism, not because David reaped the harvest of Robespierre, but because that is what the earth desires.

Speed, the pace of the present, cannot be measured by subways or skyscrapers, but only by the cheerful grass thrusting itself forth from under city stones.

The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection.

One often hears: that is good but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday has not yet been born. It has not yet really existed. I want Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus to live once more, and I am not satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus.

Apples, bread, potatoes-from now on they will quench not only physical but spiritual hunger.

The separation of Culture and the State is the most significant event of our revolution.

We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard.