Ernesto Cardenal Quotes

#1. What Marxism calls atheism is basically the negation of an idol, which sometimes bears the name of God.

Ernesto Cardenal

#2. All human eyes have longing in them.

Ernesto Cardenal

#3. It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness.

Ernesto Cardenal

#4. I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake.

Ernesto Cardenal

#5. Slogan-making is not poetry.

Ernesto Cardenal

#6. I am not interested in an economic liberation of man without the liberation of the whole man.

Ernesto Cardenal

#7. We all share in the same cosmic rhythm ... For all natural laws are like the rhythm of the strings of the harp.

Ernesto Cardenal

#8. My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.

Ernesto Cardenal

#9. I think that the proclamation of the Gospel is sometimes nearer to an atheistic point of view than to traditional religious attitudes.

Ernesto Cardenal

#10. I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry.

Ernesto Cardenal

#11. I speak of the current civilization and I consider her not as a symbol but as victim-victim, really, of the commercialization, of the falsification of this real world. That is my theme.

Ernesto Cardenal

#12. God may do something silly at any time, because, like any lover, God does not reason. God is drunk with love.

Ernesto Cardenal

#13. LIFE IS SUBVERSIVE

Ernesto Cardenal

#14. According to some liberation theologians atheism is not the cause of the conflict between Christianity and Marxism, but is rather the link between them.

Ernesto Cardenal

#15. We turn outward, attracted by the beauty we see in created things without realizing that they are only a reflection of the real beauty. And the real beauty is within us.

Ernesto Cardenal

#16. You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.

Ernesto Cardenal

#17. The revolution in Nicaragua was the first of its kind to be accomplished with the mass support of Christians, a fact that cannot fail to influence the further development of revolutionary movements in the whole of Latin America, whose inhabitants are predominantly Christian.

Ernesto Cardenal

#18. I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry. I also think that my poetry should not be only known as the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal but rather as Nicaraguan poetry.

Ernesto Cardenal

#19. Like a lover who spends all his time thinking of his distant love, God has been thinking of me since before I was born, for all eternity.

Ernesto Cardenal