Quotes by Tudor Arghezi

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The writer comes into the world with a contract signed with eternity.

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What would poetry be? The echo of our felt and unconfessed will, the confidant of our unknown secret, the work of our tears and silent sighs, to whom is due the great discretion of the inner life.

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Poetry is a premonition, suspicion, uncertainty and approximately...

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One could say that (poetry) is the shadow of life lived, a shadow hidden in spoken beauties...

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It (poetry) makes possible the intellectual resonance and suaveness of existence, removes the skepticism that collapses men, guarantees to culture a continual refreshment, and to man the inhabitant of a great wider daily miracle, the faculty of feeling.

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Poetry preserves for the souls who share it, in the professional work of the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, that youth of expensive naiveties and trusts in life and in the bearers of life...

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Writing is not entertainment. Martyrdom, patience, selflessness and many sacrifices.

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I think there is no need to say that poetry is a necessity of everyone's soul, in whatever direction it manifests itself. It is the sweet or bitter burden of each of us. It remains to decipher how written poetry should be, especially that so-called poetry which saddens me and which is more like prose without head and end - and unfortunately without substance.

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...If there was only that, copy and shorthand, realism could never have founded a literary school, it would have meant nothing. Realism is an inspiration. What makes it all valuable is precisely its incessant transparency, are the figures, visible with the mind, that thought describes inside it, strictly geometrizing... Nature gives matter; man stylizes it.

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To lie does not imply the meaning of denying the truth, nor of not clinging to it.