Allen Ginsberg famous quotes

To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Writing #Voice #Design

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#America #Literature #Given

Our heads are round so thought can change direction
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Learning #Science

I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Thinking #Views #Point Of View

You are what you think about all day.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Inspirational #Thinking

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Writing #Self #Recognition

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Pain #Ease #Wells

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Time #Lying #Party

I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Hurt #Believe #Feelings

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved
-- Allen Ginsberg

#World

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Solitude #Literature #World

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Insanity #Mind #Naked

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Art #War #Effort

First thought, best thought.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Crafts #Firsts

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Fiction #Science Fiction

America, why are your libraries full of tears?
-- Allen Ginsberg

#America #Tears #Library

Every American wants MORE & MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more & more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Sex #Mistake #America

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Writing #Voice #Saint

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Media #Culture #Literature

I smoke ***** every chance I get.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#War #Marijuana #Drug

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Political #Democracy #Literature

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Hipster #Night #Mind

The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Civilization #Jehovah #Middle

Man’s usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Men #Whales #Cells

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Writing #Listening #Care

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Believe #Nuts #Want

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Rain #America #Snow

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Typewriters #Great Writers

You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Past #Paris #Wonderful

The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Doors #Closets

There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Writing #Down And #Should

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Nice #Eight #Average

...the bewildering beauty of Paris...
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Paris

The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Floating #Fleeting #World

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Doe #World #Awareness

Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Important #Quality #Generations

Candor disarms paranoia.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Paranoia #Candor

Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Art #Self #Expression

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Art #Philosophy #People

Scientist alone is true poet.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Poet #Scientist

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Beautiful #Beautiful Things

Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Horse #Art #Wind