Described by Gabriel García Márquez as “the most important poet of the 20th century in any language”, the Chilean Pablo Neruda (real name Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto) was, in addition to being a writer, a prominent political activist, diplomat and communist militant, who He lived for a time in exile. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On the anniversary of his birth, we pay tribute to him with some of his best quotes.
“For nothing separate us that nothing unites us”.
“I love your feet because they walked on the earth and on the wind and on the water, until they found me.”
“They can cut all the flowers, but they can’t stop the spring.”
“I like you when you are silent because you are absent”.
“The seed springs from everywhere, all ideas are exotic, we expect immense changes every day, we live with enthusiasm the mutation of the human order.”
“If nothing saves us from death, unless love saves us from life.”
“There is a certain pleasure in madness, which only the madman knows.”
“The child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who will be greatly missed.”
“We poets hate hate and make war on war.”
“It happens that I get tired of being a man.”
“Whoever discovers who I am will discover who you are.”
“For my heart your chest is enough, for your freedom my wings are enough”.
“But I do not love your feet except because they walked on the earth and on the wind and on the water, until they found me.”
“How would I know how to love you, woman, how would I know how to love you, love you like no one has ever known! To die and still love you more. And still love you more.”
“Only with ardent patience will we conquer the splendid city that will give light, justice and dignity to all men. Thus poetry will not have sung in vain”.
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
“They ask me for the prophetic that is in me, with melancholy and a blow of objects that call without being answered there, and a movement without truce, and a confused name”.
“I believed that the route passed through man, and that destiny had to come from there.”
“Does the one who always waits suffer more than the one who never waited for anyone?”
“Don’t do with love what a child does with his balloon, who ignores it when he has it and cries when he loses it.”
“In you the rivers sing and my soul flees in them as you wish and to where you want”.
“It is forbidden not to smile at problems, not to fight for what you want, to abandon everything out of fear, not to make your dreams come true.”
“Love is so short and oblivion is so long.”
“There is no more destiny than the one that we will make ourselves with thoroughbreds, by hand”.
“(…) Suddenly while you were going with me I touched you and my life stopped: in front of my eyes you were, reigning over me, and you reign. Like a bonfire in the woods, fire is your kingdom.”
“The wine opens the doors with amazement and in the shelter of the months it dumps its body with its soaked red wings”.
“The fuero for the great thief, the jail for the one who steals a bread”.