Top 50 Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you’re too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

2. “Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

3. “Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

4. “To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist – if you say you are, you probably aren’t.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

5. “Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

6. “Don’t bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

7. “Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

8. “Make your mind learn its way around the heart.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

9. “Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

10. “I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

11. “The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

12. “Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

13. “I think if there’s a great depression there might be some hope.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

14. “The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

15. “My country tears of thee.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

16. “In Plato’s republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

17. “Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

18. “Think long thoughts in short sentences.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

19. “As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

20. “I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

21. “I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

22. “I have a feeling I’m falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can’t help it if the ground itself is falling.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

23. “I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

24. “It’s much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

25. “We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Featured in: Reading Quotes

26. “There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

27. “Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they’d been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

28. “The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

29. “Invent a new language anyone can understand.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

30. “See it was like this when we waltz into this place. A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-step And I says Dad let’s cut but then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really exist Wow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

31. “When you’re young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Featured in: Romance Quotes

32. “Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

33. “We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

34. “Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

35. “For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

36. “I’m reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Featured in: Reading Quotes

37. “Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

38. “We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn’t have any money for lawyers.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

39. “Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

40. “I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

41. “The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

42. “Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

43. “They were looking for a stable, but we didn’t have one. In fact, we weren’t very stable ourselves.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

44. “This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I’m not so interested in nostalgia. I’m interested in the future.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

45. “Paperbacks weren’t considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

46. “The best writing is what’s right in front of you. Sometimes I’d walk down the street with poets and they wouldn’t see anything. I’d have to shake their arm and say, ‘Look! Look!”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

47. “A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

48. “The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all ‘bottom line’ editors; everything depends on the money.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

49. “The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

50. “I’d ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It’s got to go. It’s got to go a long way from here.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti