Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Osip Mandelstam
23 quotes
“We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stalin Epigram" (November 1933) (Russian: Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны...; English: "We live, not sensing our own country beneath us",) trans. A. S. Kline.
“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (1970), ch. 35
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A POET ABOUT HIMSELF translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
“Why can't we shake things up, why can't these good translators be utilized in collective undertakings?”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Apples, bread, potatoes-from now on they will quench not only physical but spiritual hunger.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The separation of Culture and the State is the most significant event of our revolution.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the poet has no fear of recurrence and is easily intoxicated on Classical wine.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the word wanders freely around the thing, like the soul around an abandoned, but not forgotten body.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One question conditions the dynamics and balance of color in the composition of a painting: whence the source of light?”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the circulation of translated literature increases, we can observe the growth of interest in language study among the Komsomol masses, among the working youth, and in the colleges. Just how young people undertake the study of foreign languages is of interest: they approach language learning with the triumphant spirit of a conqueror invading previously forbidden territory. Knowledge of languages is a mighty weapon in the hands of the ruling class. With the aid of this weapon the composition of the entire cultural present is counterfeited and world literature is falsified until it reaches the condition demanded by people of position.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source