100 Top Quotes By Allen Ginsberg, The Author Of Howl And Other Poems

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

  

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

Think

  

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight,the weight we carry is love.

  

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.

Yourself

  

We're all golden sunflowers inside.

  

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.

Think , Time

  

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

Culture

  

Our heads are round so thought can change direction

  

I know too much and not enough

  

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.

  

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

Never

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

  

Everybody's serious but me.

Me

  

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

  

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

  

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.

Never

  

Just because I like to suck cock doesn't make me any less American than Jesse Helms.

Like , Me

  

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?

  

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.

  

I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.

  

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

Experience

  

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination

  

With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls

  

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

  

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

  

Candor disarms paranoia.

  

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

  

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

  

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

Life

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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.

  

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

  

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.

  

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

Me

  

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

  

No rest without love, No sleep without dreams of love - be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines the final wish is love.

  

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

  

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing... I can't stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

Yourself

  

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.

  

Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?

  

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

Me

  

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved

  

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving...

  

Sanity - a trick of agreement

  

All these books are published in Heaven.

  

You too must seek the sun...

  

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

  

I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly. God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.

  

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

  

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.

Time

  

Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.

  

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

  

He threw up his hands and wrote the Universe dont exist and died to prove it

  

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

  

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.

  

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?

Me

  

The universe is mad, slightly mad.

  

Who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism

  

Not even the human imagination satisfies the endless emptiness of the soul.

  

What is obscenity? And to whom?

  

What came is gone forever every time

Time

  

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

  

War is good business Invest your son

  

Happiness exists I feel it. I cried for my soul, I cried for the world's soul. The world has a beautiful soul.

  

He saw that I was shy, and at the time I was still scared of feeling with another person, so he put his arm around me and pulled me and put my head on his breast and gave me love actually.

Me , Time

  

Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!

  

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

  

Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]

  

No more to say, and nothing to weep for

  

Absolutes are Coercion. Change is absolute.

  

Inside skull vast as outside skull

  

Anger falling asleep at the heart

  

Scientist alone is true poet.

  

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

  

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

  

YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN

  

Senseless, senseless coughs of emotion

  

Earth pollution identical with Mind pollution, consciousness Pollution identical with filthy sky

  

Trees scream and drop bright leaves

  

...salute the new sunset

  

Thus, as the Buddha said to a lady who offered him a curse,the gift is returned to the giver when it is not accepted

  

Banks burn, boys die bullet-eyed, mothers scream realization the vast tonnage of napalm

  

Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe

  

Who sought heaven under a mountain of stone, sat thinking till he realized the land of blessedness exists in the imagination -

  

America, the plum blossoms are falling.

  

Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.

  

More diamonds and pearls of electricity

  

You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there's no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

  

Brainwash cried Romney, the Governor of Pollution

  

Shit, Violence, bullets in the brain Unavailing. We're in too deep to pull out. Waiting for an orgasm, Mr. Baldwin? Yes, waiting for an orgasm that's all.

  

The electric network selling itself: "The medium is the message

  

Eat Meat and your a beast

  

That blue flame burnning? Industry!

  

We the People - shelling the Vietcong

  

I have no other possessions of value but my soul.