Top 160 Allen Ginsberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.”

— Allen Ginsberg

102. “Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That’s what I was looking for.”

— Allen Ginsberg

103. “Scientist alone is true poet.”

— Allen Ginsberg

104. “You can’t photograph everything.”

— Allen Ginsberg

105. “Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion! Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death! Money against Eternity! and eternity’s strong mills grind out vast paper of Illusion!”

— Allen Ginsberg

106. “Love is only a recognition of our own guilt and imperfection, and a supplication for forgiveness to the perfect beloved. This is why we love those who are more beautiful than ourselves, why we fear them, and why we must be unhappy lovers.”

— Allen Ginsberg

107. “We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.”

— Allen Ginsberg

108. “Poetry’s role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.”

— Allen Ginsberg

109. “The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene.”

— Allen Ginsberg

110. “They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven!”

— Allen Ginsberg

111. “Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.”

— Allen Ginsberg

112. “We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.”

— Allen Ginsberg

113. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked... who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts...”

— Allen Ginsberg

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

— Allen Ginsberg

115. “I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.”

— Allen Ginsberg

116. “I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I’ll never be sane.”

— Allen Ginsberg

117. “The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.”

— Allen Ginsberg

118. “The message is: Widen the area of consciousness.”

— Allen Ginsberg

119. “Others can measure their visions by what we see.”

— Allen Ginsberg

120. “I am miserable now – not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me – resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, – the tenderness I never had. I don’t want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I’ve carried around in me all my life.”

— Allen Ginsberg

121. “If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.”

— Allen Ginsberg

122. “The poetry is like a rhythmic articulation of feeling.” – Allen Ginsberg.”

— Allen Ginsberg

123. “My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven’t disappeared, time’s left its remnants and qualities for me to use – my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”

— Allen Ginsberg

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

— Allen Ginsberg

125. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

126. “It’s time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population.”

— Allen Ginsberg

127. “I feel my life is sterile, I am unbloomed, unused, I have nothing I can have that I will ever want, only some love, only dearness and tenderness, to make me weep. I am moved now and sad and unhappy beyond cold unhappiness, beyond any inconvenience that will cause you by my affection.”

— Allen Ginsberg

128. “Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.”

— Allen Ginsberg

129. “I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.”

— Allen Ginsberg

130. “The most important thing about dreams is the existence in them of magical emotions, to which waking consciousness is not ordinarily sentient. Awe of vast constructions; familiar eternal halls of buildings; sexual intensity in rapport; deathly music; grief awakenings, perfected lodgings.”

— Allen Ginsberg

131. “Who can prophesy peace, or vow Futurity for any but armed insects.”

— Allen Ginsberg

132. “There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know.”

— Allen Ginsberg

133. “How mercy gets to exist, where it comes from, perhaps can be seen from the inner evidence and images of the poem – an act of self-realization, self acceptance and the consequent and inevitable relaxation of protective anxiety and self hood and the ability to see and love others in themselves as angels without stupid mental self deceiving moral categories selecting who it is safe to sympathize with and who is not safe.”

— Allen Ginsberg

134. “I don’t want to suffer any more, I have had my mind broken open over and over before, I have been isolate and loveless always. I have not slept with anyone since I saw you, not because I was faithful but because I am afraid and I know no one. I will always be afraid I will always be worthless, I will always be alone till I die and I will be tormented long after you leave me.”

— Allen Ginsberg

135. “It’s too bad our problems are not solved more easily. But that is an old stupid complaint. Still the others are stupid. It is as if to save ourselves we had to save them too. That is why genius must suffer- it has to bear the burdens of the whole world. Our happiness and reality depends on the happiness and reality of others.”

— Allen Ginsberg

136. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

— Allen Ginsberg

137. “I have just discovered that I have no feelings, just thoughts, borrowed thoughts taken from someone I admire because he seems to have feelings.”

— Allen Ginsberg

138. “Why are you afraid to submit to the annihilation of such stupid meaningless unreal knowledge. This is the abyss. Everything is green, love, without the logical fantastic equivocations that we invent so that we won’t actually have to face each other.”

— Allen Ginsberg

139. “The world knows the love that’s in its breast as in the flower, the suffering lonely world.”

— Allen Ginsberg

140. “No point writing when the spirit doth not lead.”

— Allen Ginsberg

141. “I want to see you. I feel more and more at with you now actually than ever before, I feel you more, actually more clarity, more confidence, more trust.”

— Allen Ginsberg

142. “Where are we going, Walt Whitman?”

— Allen Ginsberg

143. “Nobody wants to hear about your feelings, darling, tell me what you see!”

— Allen Ginsberg

144. “My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.”

— Allen Ginsberg

145. “I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.”

— Allen Ginsberg

146. “I hadn’t thought about what any army trains for. It merely maintains itself here for no exterior purpose.”

— Allen Ginsberg

147. “When Violence floods the State from above, flowery land razed for robot proliferation.”

— Allen Ginsberg

148. “You are a pot of gold, don’t think I don’ realize it.”

— Allen Ginsberg

149. “You were right, I suppose, in keeping your distance. I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity.”

— Allen Ginsberg

150. “Don’t you see that I cannot be composed, I cannot reconcile myself, because there is no other reality but loneliness for me and before I am dragged back into isolation I will clasp and grasp and claw in fright even at you without consciousness – even I – and I am afraid that I cannot survive if I have to go on into myself.”

— Allen Ginsberg