Allen Ginsberg, one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, is renowned for his raw, rebellious, and thought-provoking words. His poetry often challenged societal norms, delving deep into themes of politics, spirituality, and personal freedom. Allen Ginsberg Quotes are celebrated for their power to provoke reflection, inspire change, and question the status quo.
Whether you’re exploring his revolutionary works or looking for wisdom on life and society, Ginsberg’s quotes offer insights that resonate across generations.
Allen Ginsberg Quotes
Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.
2. The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid.
3. What came is gone forever every time.
4. What is obscenity? And to whom?
5. Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question “How does one become a prophet?”]
6. How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.
7. The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger’s words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake’s The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn’t do it. In the end, I did it myself.
8. You can’t photograph everything.
9. An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank’s photography)
10. You are what you think about all day.
11. 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.
12. Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!
13. [William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don’t know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it’s an unrelieved hallucination, because you don’t know where you’re coming in and you don’t know where you’re going out. It ends, you’re going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don’t know.
14. The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
15. “You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole
society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.”
16. The threw up his hands and wrote the Universe dont exist and died to prove it.
17. 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.
18. I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense.
19. A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.
20. The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal… That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing… The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won’t show people. To write secretly… so you can actually be free to say anything you want.
21. Everybody’s serious but me.
22. Others can measure their visions by what we see.
23. Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.
24. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
25. That’s what the shaman said. He didn’t know what he was up against. He didn’t expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this “entity,” as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit.
26. Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?
27. 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.
28. America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
29. War is good business Invest your son
30. We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death.
31. My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
32. You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening. If you’re grasping to get your own voice, you’re making a strained attempt to talk, so it’s a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you’re talking about something that’s intensely important to you.
33. Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts Wet processions Families walk Stunted boys big heads don’t talk Look bony skulls & silent round eyes Starving black angels in human disguise.
34. Poets are Damned… but See with the Eyes of Angels.
35. Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.
36. Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.
37. Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?
38. I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do.
39. Bob Dylan’s one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.
40. None of us understand what we’re doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.
41. we’re all golden sunflowers inside.
42. in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
43. We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
44. The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.
45. It’s time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population.
46. 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.
47. To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.
48. Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.
49. Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he’ll make us a new universe if it comes to that.
50. Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.
51. The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it’s a relief to realize you can let go.
52. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
53. To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.
54. Candor disarms paranoia.
55. I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
56. Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven’t got the health.
57. 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.
58. I’ve got enough money to live where I want, but I don’t want to move. Go out and have sexual adventures in Burma.
59. Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
60. Sanity – a trick of agreement
61. I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.
62. There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know.
63. What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
64. The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around.
65. I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
66. “Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness – to seek the light.
Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness – to seek the light.
Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.”
67. I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.
68. America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
69. what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination
70. 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.
71. Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
72. First thoughts are the strongest.
73. I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.
74. If you want to make order, put your own heart in order, and, having put one’s heart in order, one can regulate the family order.
75. There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We’re in science fiction now.
76. 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.
77. Scientist alone is true poet.
78. When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.
79. Ultimately Warhol’s private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
80. I know too much and not enough
81. Fortunately art is a community effort – a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
82. It’s very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That’s exactly what it is.
83. No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake’s illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet’s oceanic horizon. No harm.
84. …we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re all blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment (Sunflower Sutra)
85. 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
86. The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
87. To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it’s certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing.
88. What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
89. You too must seek the sun.
90. I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I’ll never be sane.
91. Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
92. Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!
93. I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.
94. America, why are your libraries full of tears?
95. You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.
96. Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
97. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
98. 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.
99. Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.
100. Our heads are round so thought can change direction
101. Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.
102. I know I’m not God, are you? Don’t be silly. God? God? Everybody’s God? Don’t be silly.
103. Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame
104. The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred
105. Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.
106. I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it’s Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows –/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.
107. First thought, best thought.
108. I learned a world from each one whom I loved.
109. Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
110. The suffering itself is not so bad; it’s the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.
111. Man’s usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells.
112. I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
113. The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found – the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.
114. It isn’t enough for your heart to break because everybody’s heart is broken now.
115. Presumably, if you see spirit at the moment it gained access, then it’ll be dropped.
116. A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don’t hide the madness.
117. Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.
118. Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me Belly to belly and knee to knee Who’ll look into my hooded eye Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh?
119. I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks… or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don’t bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.
120. Things are symbols of themselves.
121. The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
122. So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, ‘You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.’
123. It’s never to late to do nothing at all.
124. Subject is known by what she sees.
125. The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important – a light you can get at – or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman’s latern.
126. Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection – with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.
127. I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.
128. It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless – abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.
129. I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
130. Poetry’s role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.
131. This is the same notion – Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices – getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it’s the Ugly Spirit. That’s a great step. Because the spirit doesn’t want its name to be known.
132. I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs – when I was 17 – that I realized I was talking through an empty skull… I wasn’t thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.
133. 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.
134. The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!
135. 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.
136. The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. “The ugly spirit shot Joan because . . .” and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state.
137. The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.
138. The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness.
139. Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
140. I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.
141. Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
142. They [Nicaragua] haven’t had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally?
143. who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism
144. We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
145. I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America.
146. The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene
147. Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what’s vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.
148. I didn’t know the names of the flowers – now my garden is gone.
149. If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction
150. From it’s inception Beat poetry was hailed as “something NEW” and “like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected – by hip people who listen.” But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
151. Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.
152. Every American wants MORE & MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more & more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you’re twice as aware of the rug.
153. “The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the
biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.”
154. What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?
155. Inside skull vast as outside skull
156. 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.
157. All these books are published in Heaven.
158. When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.
159. The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.
160. I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.
161. Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go.
162. one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others
163. So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he’s moving through.
164. The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?
165. 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.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Allen Ginsberg Quotes continue to inspire and challenge readers to think critically about life, society, and their own journey.
His fearless expression of thoughts and emotions speaks to the heart of human experience, encouraging us to embrace individuality and question the world around us.
As you reflect on his quotes, may you find both inspiration and a deeper understanding of the complex realities we navigate today.
