Eugenio Montale Quotes

No system disappears quickly because habits live on.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

Someone needs to drag you kicking and screaming into this century.

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone.

It is not so difficult a task to plant new truths, as to root out old errors; for there is this paradox in men, they run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favor of that which is old.

Most of my work for the past 25 years has been devoted to organizing demonstrations, benefits and campaigns, many of which have had the effect of bringing a policy debate to public focus or moving a political agenda forward. It's become a cliché to say 'think globally and act locally,' but it works.

the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

Let us not go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there for a knowledge of what is not to be arrived at, but let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive, budding patiently under the eye of Apollo, and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit - sap will be given us for meat and dew for drink.

I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.

Entrenched customs represent a social equilibrium, and moving away from that equilibrium is difficult to do on your own.

Your past is important but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.

Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.

I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.

As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

The primary thing that I enjoy about Luke Cage is that he has a morality about him but it's conflicted. He's never sure what the right move is, but he at least contemplates it. He's a not a rash character. It's that thoughtfulness that I really identify with.

The fact that women have been moving forward, that a woman was running for president, that we had a black president - I think there was, without a doubt, a whitelash and a complete backlash against the liberation of women, against the power of people of color.

In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.

Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to.

Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration.

Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.

The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.