VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it

Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. It must be spread everywhere –- on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.

Gentle souls! You play your love on the violin. The crude ones play it on the drums violently. But can you turn yourselves inside out, like me And become just two lips entirely?

Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life. We're quits: stupid to draw up a list of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains.

If an American is motoring on his own, he (the paragon of morality and chastity) will slow down and stop beside every solitary pretty female pedestrian, bare his teeth in a big smile, and tempt her into his car with a wild roll of the eyes. A lady who fails to appreciate his passion will qualify as an idiot who doesn't realise how lucky she is to have the opportunity of getting to know the owner of this 100-horse-power motor car.

Listen! If stars are lit It means there is someone who needs it, It means someone wants them to be, That someone deems those specks of spit Magnificent!

A line is a fuse that's lit. The line smolders, the rhyme explodes— and by a stanza a city is blown to bits.

In our language rhyme is a barrel. A barrel of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line smoulders to the end and explodes; and the town is blown sky-high in a stanza.

I understand the power and the alarm of words - Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes, but those which make coffins break from bearers and on their four oak legs walk right away.

There’s no grandfatherly fondness in me, There are no gray hairs in my soul! Shaking the world with my voice and grinning, I pass you by, - handsome, Twentytwoyearold.

In the church of my heart the choir is on fire

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

If you like I'll be furious flesh elemental, or- changing to tones that the sunset arouses- if you like- I'll be extraordinary gentle, not a man but - a cloud in trousers.

The love boat has crashed against the everyday.

If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: not a man, but a cloud in trousers!

On I’ll pass, dragging my huge love behind me. On what feverish night, deliria-ridden, by what Goliaths was I begot – I, so big and by no one needed?

Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed. The Milky Way streams silver through the night. I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams I have no cause to wake or trouble you. And, as they say, the incident is closed. Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind. Now you and I are quits. Why bother then To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts. Behold what quiet settles on the world. Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars. In hours like these, one rises to address The ages, history, and all creation.

To us love says humming that the heart's stalled motor has begun working again.

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain.