Osip Mandelstam Quotes

It is indeed astonishing that all are obsessed with poets and cannot tear themselves away from them. You would think that once they were read, that was that. Transcended, as they say now. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection.

The October Revolution could not but influence my work since it took away my "biography," my sense of individual significance. I am grateful to it, however, for once and for all putting an end to my spiritual security and to a cultural life supported by unearned cultural income... I feel indebted to the Revolution, but I offer it gifts for which it still has no need. The question about what a writer should be is completely incomprehensible to me: to answer it would be tantamount to inventing a writer, that is, to writing his works for him.

The eighteenth century was an age of secularization, that is, it recognized human thought and activity as worldly ventures. Hatred for the priesthood, the hieratic cult, and the liturgy was deep in its blood. Although not an age devoted predominantly to social struggle, it was a period when society was painfully aware of caste. The determinism inherited from the Middle Ages hung menacingly over philosophy and enlightenment, and over its political experiments right down to the tiers état. The caste of priests, the caste of warriors, the caste of landowners-those were the concepts through which "enlightened minds" operated. These castes should not be confused with classes: the above-mentioned elements were all considered necessary to the sacred architectonics of any society. The immense, accumulated energy of social conflict sought an outlet. All the aggressive demands of the age, all the strength of its principled indignation, fell upon the caste of priests.

Today a kind of speaking in tongues is taking place. In sacred frenzy poets speak the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible.

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.

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

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.

Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form, and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs, and gateways insure the State against the ravages of time.

The life of the word has entered a heroic era. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering. People are hungry. The State is even hungrier. But there is something still hungrier: Time. Time wants to devour the State...There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary State, and a hungry State is more terrifying than a hungry man. To show compassion for the State which denies the word shall be the contemporary poet's social obligation and heroic feat.

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.

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.

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

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