I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it. Osip Mandelstam
About This Quote

The beautiful art of poetry has a way of restoring a person’s faith in the world. Perhaps the most important thing about poetry is that it enables people to speak from their heart. When someone is able to tell a story through the power of words, they are able to convey their emotions and thoughts in a practical way that can help others understand them more clearly. Of course, this does not always happen.

Sometimes people read poetry and do not fully understand its effect on them. But if someone reads a poem and feels as if they have been given a new lease on life, then they know how it can be beneficial to others.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the... - P.g. Wodehouse
  2. It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time, ' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but... - Christopher Hitchens
  3. Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we... - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  4. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled... - Osip Mandelstam
  5. It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist, ' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving... - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
More Quotes By Osip Mandelstam
  1. My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.
  2. Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.
  3. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled...
  4. Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.
  5. One cannot launch a new history – the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ – the mechanical movement of a clock...
Related Topics