35 Quotes by Osip Mandelstam

Life is one in all its manifestations. You must experience everything, be capable of everything, and rejoice in everything.

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

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

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.

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

The earth is buzzing with metaphor

One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.

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

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.