Top 290 Quotes & Sayings by Pablo Neruda - Page 3

Today is today, and yesterday is gone. There is no doubt.

I love all things, not because they are passionate or sweet-smelling but because, I don't know, because this ocean is yours, and mine: these buttons and wheels and little forgotten treasures, fans upon whose feathers love has scattered its blossoms, glasses, knives and scissors -- all bear the trace of someone's fingers on their handle or surface, the trace of a distant hand lost in the depths of forgetfulness.

Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in this world?

Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything.

What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?

I got lost in the night, without the light of your eyelids, and when the night surrounded me I was born again: I was the owner of my own darkness.

Perhaps this war will pass like the others which divided us leaving us dead, killing us along with the killers but the shame of this time puts its burning fingers to our faces. Who will erase the ruthlessness hidden in innocent blood?

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.

And I, a materialist who does not believe in the starry heaven promised to a human being, for this dog and for every dog I believe in heaven, yes, I believe in a heaven that I will never enter, but he waits for me wagging his big fan of a tail so I, soon to arrive, will feel welcomed.

If suddenly you do not exist, If suddenly you are not living, I shall go on living. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall go on living.

I want to do for you what the spring does for the cherry trees

On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

Eating alone is a disappointment. But not eating matter more, is hollow and green, has thorns like a chain of fish hooks, trailing from the heart, clawing at your insides. Hunger feels like pincers, like the bite of crabs; it burns, burns, and has no fur. Let us sit down soon to eat with all those who haven't eaten; let us spread great tablecloths, put salt in lakes of the world, set up planetary bakeries, tables with strawberries in snow, and a plate like the moon itself from which we can all eat. For now I ask no more than the justice of eating.

Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul? When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate, and just after learning to walk, we are tripped, and just for wanting to love, we are hated, and for no more than touching, we are hurt, which of us hasn't started to arm himself, to make himself sharp, somehow, like a knife, to pay back the hurt?

From sorrow to sorrow love crosses its islands and establishes roots that are watered by weeping.

There is no insurmountable solitude.

Love is a clash of lightnings

Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

I am everybody and every time, I always call myself by your name.

I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases.

Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.

my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping but I shall go on living.

Once more I am the silent one who came out of the distance wrapped in cold rain and bells: I owe to earth's pure death the will to sprout.

I do not love you-except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, from waiting to not waiting for you my heart moves from the cold into the fire.

We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones, knowing they will go on, inert or burning, and I was discovering, naming all the these things: it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

Place gifts of silver in our hands. Give us this day our daily fish.

In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

If you should ask me where I've been all this time I have to say "Things happen." I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth, on the river ruined in its own duration: I know nothing save things the birds have lost, the sea I left behind, or my sister crying. Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock with day? Why the dark night swilling round in our mouths? And why the dead?

Love is a war of lightning, and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.

I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter.

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

I move in the university of the waves.

Love is the mystery of water and a star.

You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence, while the sea destroys its perpetual statues, collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness: because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics, galloping water, incessant sand, we make the only permanent tenderness.

I think it was very informative, but a lot still needs to be done.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

When everything seems to be set to show me off as intelligent, the fool I always keep hidden takes over all that I say.

Tomorrow we will only give them a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf which will fall on the earth like if it had been made by our lips like a kiss which falls from our invincible heights to show the fire and the tenderness of a true love.

My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

This means that we have barely disembarked into life, that we've only just now been born, let's not fill our mouths with so many uncertain names, with so many sad labels, with so many pompous letters, with so much yours and mine, with so much signing of papers. I intend to confuse things, to unite them, make them new-born intermingle them, undress them, until the light of the world has the unity of the ocean, a generous wholeness, a fragrance alive and crackling.

Well, now If little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you Little by little If suddenly you forget me Do not look for me For I shall already have forgotten you If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots Remember That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms And my roots will set off to seek another land

If you no longer live, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain in my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall live

When I sleep every night, what am I called or not called? And when I wake, who am I if I was not I while I slept?

Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that forms the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes and your mouth that has the smile of the water. A black yearning sun is braided into the strands of your black mane, when you stretch your arms. You play with the sun as with a little brook and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.

Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams, fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness.

The tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.

Sufre mas el que espera siempre que aquel que nunca espero a nadie? Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?

Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss.

Maybe someone will know I didn't weave crowns to draw blood; that I faught against mockery; that I did fill the high tide of my soul with truth. I repaid vileness with doves.

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

In this part of the story I am the one who dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you, because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.

Give me, for my life, all lives, give me all the pain of everyone, I'm going to turn it into hope. Give me all the joys, even the most secret, because otherwise how will these things be known? I have to tell them, give me the labors of everyday, for that's what I sing.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines...Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

I should like to sleep like a cat, with all the fur of time, with a tongue rough as flint, with the dry sex of fire; and after speaking to no one, stretch myself over the world, over roofs and landscapes, with a passionate desire to hunt the rats in my dreams.

The night is shattered, and the blue stars shiver in the distance.