Quotes by Mihai Codreanu

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Don't ask too much from life, if you don't want to know how little it can give you.

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Since you consent to live, don't complain in the desert about all the filth of life.

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I want you, poets, with troubled hearts: / wish, dream and laugh, cry. May nature / reflect in you the immensity / of its varied composition. / And let your souls be tried / by as many passions as possible. Let happiness, / pain and anger and love / bubble up in you mixed. / As the cloud is charged with lightning, / so may your soul be charged with the longing / to elevate your word through acquaintances, - / so that in harmonies you may embody its excess, / glorifying a single paradise: The wind... / Having only one God: the Beautiful.

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Poets, I know a demon who preys on us / of the soul's clear treasure / and with his light sonority / gives it to the wild, in parade clothes. / Beneath the giant waterfall of thought / it spins like an enchanted mill: / there is a rose in a maiden's smile / and a sword is made in a brave hand. / We pour into his fleeting foam / imperishable strength, / if we spin his point with wisdom; / if we do not fall from the flight of the momentum / in its creeping vanity; / This demonic serpent is the word.

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Poetry sleeps in suffering, / like a diamond sleeps in coal.

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What poets write is not poetry, but the soul rhythm from which what they write springs and which they manage to make vibrate in others.

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Music is the poetry of the soul and the soul of poetry.

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The poet who does not sing like the cricket without the care of winter, is not a poet.

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When you reach the winter of life, you feed your imagination with the economy of past dreams, just as the bear in winter feeds on the economy left in the body from the abundant time of summer.

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Altruism springs from selfishness just as sunlight springs from a shadow.

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People condemn selfishness: but "self-love" is nothing but the "instinct of preservation": otherwise, without this instinct both the individual and the species would be lost... and this is how the moralists who teach us to love each other too much I put dynamite in our souls to destroy our race.

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The morality that would require you to look at yourself, cannot claim to remember your fellows.

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The charitable say: "He who gives to the poor lends to God." Curious almsgiving: to make usury even with God.

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You can burn the truth in the fire, it rises like the Phoenix from its own ashes.

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The need for truth and beauty is man's strength in relation to other animals, but also his weakness in relation to them.

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The need for truth is the need for our thinking to agree with itself.

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How can I believe in absolute truths, when the very notion of "absolute" is created by the relativity of human thinking?

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The lie is not satisfied with those whom it deceives: in the end it eats the liar; and after all, she swallows herself.