Pablo Neruda Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

Pablo Neruda
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.

Pablo Neruda
There are so many people dead
and so many sea-walls that the red sun used to split,
and so many heads that the boats hit,
and so many hands that have closed around kisses,
and so many things I would like to forget.

Pablo Neruda
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Pablo Neruda
I am everybody and every time, I always call myself by your name.

Pablo Neruda
Hate is like a swordfish, working through water invisibly and then you see it coming with blood along its blade, but transparency disarms it.

Pablo Neruda
I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

Pablo Neruda
As slippery as smooth grapes, words exploding in the light like dormant seeds waiting in the vaults of vocabulary, alive again, and giving life: once again the heart distills them.

Pablo Neruda
To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know... widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

Pablo Neruda
We have to discard the past / and, as one builds / floor by floor, window by window, / and the building rises, / so do we keep shedding - first, broken tiles, / then proud doors... and each new day / gleams / like an empty / plate.

Pablo Neruda
Is 4 the same 4 for everybody? Are all sevens equal? When the convict ponders the light is it the same light that shines on you?

Pablo Neruda
O merry, merry, merry, like only dogs know how to be happy and nothing more, with an absolute shameless nature.

Pablo Neruda
There is something from every living being in the atmosphere: close inspection of the air would disclose beggars, lawyers bandits, mailmen, seamstresses and a little of each occupation, a humbled remnant wants to perform its own work within us.

Pablo Neruda
Oh each successive night that comes has something in it of an abandoned ember that is slowly burning out, and it falls swathed in ruins, surrounded by funereal objects.

Pablo Neruda
If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.

Pablo Neruda
Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star, in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran; love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes, two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey.

Pablo Neruda
Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when...

Pablo Neruda
Day-colored wine, night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth...

Pablo Neruda
Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

Pablo Neruda
Between lips and lips there are cities of great ash and moist summit, drops of when and how, vague comings and goings: between lips and lips as along a shore of sand and glass the wind passes.

Pablo Neruda
And when you appear all the rivers sound in my body, bells shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world.

Pablo Neruda
The tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.

Pablo Neruda
Today let me forget this happiness, wider than all the sea,
because man is wider than all the sea and her necklace of islands
and we must fall into him as down a well to clamber back with
branches of secret water, recondite truths.

Pablo Neruda
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Pablo Neruda
Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

Pablo Neruda
The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
And flew through the lips and the mouth.

Pablo Neruda
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.

Pablo Neruda
And what has become of it, where is that onetime love? Now it is the grave of a bird, a drop of black quartz, a chunk of wood eroded by the rain.

Pablo Neruda
Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair.

Pablo Neruda
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart.

Pablo Neruda