Best 22 quotes of Osip Mandelstam on MyQuotes

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.

I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be continually amazed.

Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed.

Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips, And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew, And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss, Acquire their forms before we do

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.

Take from my palms, to soothe your heart, a little honey, a little sun, in obedience to Persephone's bees. You can't untie a boat that was never moored, nor hear a shadow in its furs, nor move through thick life without fear. For us, all that's left is kisses tattered as the little bees that die when they leave the hive. Deep in the transparent night they're still humming, at home in the dark wood on the mountain, in the mint and lungwort and the past. But lay to your heart my rough gift, this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees that once made a sun out of honey.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

a ship could be built entirely from foreign planks, but it must have its own form

Everything is moved by love.

I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically is to be perpetually astonished.

My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

The earth is buzzing with metaphor

The people need poetry that will be their own secret To keep them awake forever, And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.

The spiritual disposition of a poet inclines to catastrophe.

The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders, But I am no wolf by blood.

We have come to love the music of proof. Logical connection for us is not some popular song about a finch, but a choral symphony, so difficult and so inspired that the conductor must exert all his energy to keep the performers under his control.