110+ Allen Ginsberg Quotes On Death, Visionary And Protest

Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He is best known for his poem "Howl" which was a controversial work that was the subject of an obscenity trial. Ginsberg was a passionate advocate for free speech and civil rights and his work has had a major influence on American culture and literature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Allen Ginsberg on love, death, visionary.

Top 10 Allen Ginsberg Quotes

1. we're all golden sunflowers inside.
2. To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.
3. When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.
4. You are what you think about all day.
5. We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.
6. The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
7. Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!
8. The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.
9. 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.
10. I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Allen Ginsberg Image Quotes

When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain. — Allen Ginsberg

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision. — Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg Short Quotes

• Candor disarms paranoia.
• A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.
• It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.
• I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
• I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone.
• I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.
• When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.
• War is good business Invest your son
• The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
• America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Allen Ginsberg Quotes About Love

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

No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy — Allen Ginsberg

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! — Allen Ginsberg

I speak of love that comes to mind:The moon is faithful, although blind;She moves in thought she cannot speak.Perfect care has made her bleak.I never dreamed the sea so deep,The earth so dark; so long my sleep,I have become another child.I wake to see the world go wild. — Allen Ginsberg

My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves. — Allen Ginsberg

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

The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go. — Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg Quotes About World

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

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

So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through. — Allen Ginsberg

The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn. — Allen Ginsberg

An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography) — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

This is the one and only firmament; therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven. — Allen Ginsberg

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found - the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it. — Allen Ginsberg

I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild. — Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg Quotes About Drugs

Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness. — Allen Ginsberg

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine,jiggling your knees blankly in the rain.When it snows in your noseyou catch cold in your brain. — Allen Ginsberg

The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically? — Allen Ginsberg

I smoke marijuana every chance I get. — Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg Quotes About Generation

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

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade. — Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg Famous Quotes And Sayings

When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain. — Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! — Allen Ginsberg

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision. — Allen Ginsberg

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

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? — Allen Ginsberg

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night — Allen Ginsberg

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash. — Allen Ginsberg

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years. — Allen Ginsberg

What if somebody gave a war andNobody came?Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy andForever be Itself again. — Allen Ginsberg

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

A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness. — Allen Ginsberg

Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel! — Allen Ginsberg

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! — Allen Ginsberg

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts. — Allen Ginsberg

If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction — Allen Ginsberg

Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone. — Allen Ginsberg

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future. — Allen Ginsberg

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph — Allen Ginsberg

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each. — Allen Ginsberg

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

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene — Allen Ginsberg

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed. — Allen Ginsberg

Night is the wonderful opportunity to take rest, to forgive, to smile, to get ready for all the battles that you have to fight tomorrow. — Allen Ginsberg

I've got enough money to live where I want, but I don't want to move.Go out and have sexual adventures in Burma. — Allen Ginsberg

Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie. — Allen Ginsberg

I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America. — Allen Ginsberg

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded. — Allen Ginsberg

what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination — Allen Ginsberg

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier. — Allen Ginsberg

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach. — Allen Ginsberg

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. — Allen Ginsberg

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

I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now. — Allen Ginsberg

The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid. — Allen Ginsberg

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying. — Allen Ginsberg

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa! — Allen Ginsberg

I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric. — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? — Allen Ginsberg

Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go. — Allen Ginsberg

To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it's certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing. — Allen Ginsberg

Others can measure their visions by what we see. — Allen Ginsberg

Whoever controls the media — Allen Ginsberg

Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me Belly to belly and knee to knee Who’ll look into my hooded eye Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh? — Allen Ginsberg

Subject is known by what she sees. — Allen Ginsberg

You too must seek the sun. — Allen Ginsberg

What is obscenity? And to whom? — Allen Ginsberg

Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health. — Allen Ginsberg

You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you. — Allen Ginsberg

This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known. — Allen Ginsberg

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

What came is gone forever every time — Allen Ginsberg

You can't photograph everything. — Allen Ginsberg

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

Scientist alone is true poet. — Allen Ginsberg

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns? — Allen Ginsberg

Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life. — Allen Ginsberg

The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness. — Allen Ginsberg

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

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came? — Allen Ginsberg

[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know. — Allen Ginsberg

If you want to make order, put your own heart in order, and, having put one's heart in order, one can regulate the family order. — Allen Ginsberg

…we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re all blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment (Sunflower Sutra) — Allen Ginsberg

Presumably, if you see spirit at the moment it gained access, then it'll be dropped. — Allen Ginsberg

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? — Allen Ginsberg

The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern. — Allen Ginsberg

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

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm. — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on. — Allen Ginsberg

Life Lessons by Allen Ginsberg

1. Allen Ginsberg's work emphasizes the importance of being true to oneself and pursuing one's own path despite societal pressures.
2. He encourages readers to embrace their own unique perspectives and to use their voices to speak out against injustice.
3. Through his poetry, Ginsberg encourages us to live life fully, to be open to new experiences, and to strive for a more just and compassionate world.