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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

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Poetry

More quotes by Osip Mandelstam

Why can't we shake things up, why can't these good translators be utilized in collective undertakings?

ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)

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

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

The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection.

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

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Osip Mandelstam (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.