Quotes by Benjamin Fondane

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The poet brings, too, what philosophers have always sought: evidence - raw truths, good anytime and anywhere...

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In reality, these records of the poets did not suffer the fluctuations of history, did not know the embarrassing epilogues, were not swept away by the changing and successive certainties. They survived, survive and will survive...

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While the physics of the Ionians, the astronomy of Aristotle, the political, economic, theistic systems have collapsed—as those of today will collapse in a dismal tomorrow—the records of Homer, of Sophocles, of Aeschylus, all the assertions poets satisfy something alive in us, a restlessness of the heart by which we recognize life.

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Poetry is a necessity and not a pleasure, an act and not a relaxation; the poet affirms, poetry is an affirmation of reality...

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When we listen to a work of art, we do not contemplate or enjoy ourselves, we restore a broken balance, we affirm what we shamefully denied all day long; the full reality of our acts, of our hope, of our freedom, the obscure certainty that existence has a meaning, an air, a guarantor.

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A loser is not a dilettante who could like and didn't like, he is not someone who met chance and was knocked down. The danger is in the inner tragedy. The loser is a man who kills himself before every act he wants to do.

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Truths are errors that have conquered.