Paul Celan Quotes

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Spirituality now wanders from sex to drugs to art to revolution to violence--whatever seems to promise deliverance from the quotidian.

Truth comes out in wine.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

It is widely held that too much wine will dull a man's desire. Indeed it will in a dull man.

Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.

Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it.

I like my wine like my women - ready to pass out.

I made my own fictional land, which is 'Bell Choir Coast.' It was a response to feeling really, really lost, and it was what I was looking for.

No brothers shall make, buy, sell, or use, as a beverage, any spirituous or Malt Liquors, Wine, or Cider.

Wine cheers God and man.

Wine is wont to show the mind of man.

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

The important thing is to be drunk.

I am the soul in limbo.

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

Pour out wine till I become a wanderer from myself; for in selfhood and existence I have felt only fatigue.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

To keeping silence I resigned My friends would think I was a nut Turning water into wine Open doors would soon be shut So I went from day to day Though my life was in a rut 'Til I thought of what I'd say Which connection I should cut