Top 160 Allen Ginsberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You are what you think about all day.”

— Allen Ginsberg

2. “Be careful, you are not in Wonderland. I’ve heard the strange madness long growing in your soul. But you are fortunate in your ignorance, in your isolation. You who have suffered, find where love hides. Give, share, lose – lest we die, unbloomed.”

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Ignorance Quotes

3. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Quotes About Listening

4. “Our heads are round so thought can change direction.”

— Allen Ginsberg

5. “Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”

— Allen Ginsberg

6. “First thought, best thought.”

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

7. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

— Allen Ginsberg

8. “Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”

— Allen Ginsberg

9. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

10. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”

— Allen Ginsberg

11. “I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”

— Allen Ginsberg

12. “War is good business Invest your son.”

— Allen Ginsberg

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

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Design Quotes

14. “The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.”

— Allen Ginsberg

15. “What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?”

— Allen Ginsberg

16. “I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.”

— Allen Ginsberg

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

— Allen Ginsberg

18. “Night is the wonderful opportunity to take rest, to forgive, to smile, to get ready for all the battles that you have to fight tomorrow.”

— Allen Ginsberg

19. “None of us understand what we’re doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.”

— Allen Ginsberg

20. “The suffering itself is not so bad; it’s the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.”

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Real Quotes

21. “There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We’re in science fiction now.”

— Allen Ginsberg

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

— Allen Ginsberg

23. “Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.”

— Allen Ginsberg

24. “The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”

— Allen Ginsberg

25. “Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!”

— Allen Ginsberg

26. “I know too much and not enough.”

— Allen Ginsberg

27. “Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.”

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Real Quotes

28. “America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.”

— Allen Ginsberg

29. “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”

— Allen Ginsberg

30. “America, why are your libraries full of tears?”

— Allen Ginsberg

31. “Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”

— Allen Ginsberg

32. “It isn’t enough for your heart to break because everybody’s heart is broken now.”

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Broken Heart Quotes

33. “I didn’t know the names of the flowers – now my garden is gone.”

— Allen Ginsberg

34. “We’re all golden sunflowers inside.”

— Allen Ginsberg

35. “Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”

— Allen Ginsberg

36. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

37. “It’s never to late to do nothing at all.”

— Allen Ginsberg

38. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

39. “Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?”

— Allen Ginsberg

40. “Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.”

— Allen Ginsberg

41. “When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.”

— Allen Ginsberg

42. “America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?”

— Allen Ginsberg

43. “First thoughts are the strongest.”

— Allen Ginsberg

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

44. “When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.”

— Allen Ginsberg

45. “Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what’s vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.”

— Allen Ginsberg

46. “The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!”

— Allen Ginsberg

47. “Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.”

— Allen Ginsberg

48. “No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy.”

— Allen Ginsberg

49. “Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?”

— Allen Ginsberg

50. “Things are symbols of themselves.”

— Allen Ginsberg