Mayakovsky Quotes & Sayings

Men, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,
And women, battered like overused proverbs. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

If an American is motoring on his own, he (the paragon of morality and chastity) will slow down and stop beside every solitary pretty female pedestrian, bare his teeth in a big smile, and tempt her into his car with a wild roll of the eyes. A lady who fails to appreciate his passion will qualify as an idiot who doesn't realise how lucky she is to have the opportunity of getting to know the owner of this 100-horse-power motor car. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Read iron books!
"To signs" (1913) — Vladimir Mayakovsky

A line is a fuse that's lit. The line smolders, the rhyme explodes - and by a stanza a city is blown to bits. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Love
for us
is no paradise of arbors
to us
love tells us, humming,
that the stalled motor
of the heart
has started to work
again. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Mayakovsky, brazen poet of the revolution, sicced his jeering muses on gourmet fancies: Eat your pineapples, gobble your grouse Your last day is coming, you bourgeois louse! — Anya Von Bremzen

Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

My verse
has brought me
no roubles to spare:
no craftsmen have made
mahogany chairs for my house. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

The attitude of the American to the dollar contains poetry. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Maria!
How can I fit a tender word into bulging ears? — Vladimir Mayakovsky

I understand the power and the alarm of words - Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes, but those which make coffins break from bearers and on their four oak legs walk right away. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Then there's amortization,
the deadliest of all;
amortization
of the heart and soul. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Usher: Why do you play only on the black keys [of the piano]? I suppose you think black is good enough for the proletariat. You play on all the keys only for the bourgeoisie, is that it?
Oleg Bard: Please, citizen, please! I'm concentrating on the white ones!
Usher: So you think white is best? Play on both!
Oleg Bard: I am playing on both!
Usher: So you compromise with [the] Whites, opportunist! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he "ladored,"he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from "lass." "No, no, don't," she said, I must wash, quick-quick, Ada must wash; but for yet another immortal moment they stood embraced in the hushed avenue, enjoying as they had never enjoyed before, the "happy-forever" feeling at the end of never-ending fairy tales. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There's a monument due me by rank already
I'd blow the damn thing up with dynamite
So strongly I hate every kind of dead thing
So much I adore every kind of life! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

To us love says humming that the heart's stalled motor has begun working again. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Listen! If stars are lit It means there is someone who needs it, It means someone wants them to be, That someone deems those specks of spit Magnificent! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Here's how I used to think
you made a book:
a poet comes along,
mouth half open, inspired,
then suddenly the idiot bursts into song -
fancy that! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Have you seen
a dog lick the hand that thrashed it?! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Gentle souls!
You play your love on the violin.
The crude ones play it on the drums violently.
But can you turn yourselves inside out, like me
And become just two lips entirely? — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Soon, sampled by everyone,
Stale and pallid,
I'll come out
And mumble toothlessly
That today I'm
Remarkably candid. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Girl Tractorist: As the poet Mayakovsky said: "The home of the Soviet people shall be the home of Reason"! — Bertolt Brecht

Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life. We're quits: stupid to draw up a list of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: not a man, but a cloud in trousers! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Too slow, the wagons of years,
The oxen of days
too glum.
Our god is the god of speed,
Our heart
our battle-drum. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Comrade life,
let us
march faster,
March
faster through what's left
of the five-year plan. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

In the church of my heart the choir is on fire — Vladimir Mayakovsky

I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one's slant accordingly - at least once every ten years. The great heroic devotion to one point of view is very alien to me - it's a lack of humility. Mayakovsky killed himself because his pride would not be reconciled with something new happening within himself - or around him. — Boris Pasternak

There's no grandfatherly fondness in me,
There are no gray hairs in my soul!
Shaking the world with my voice and grinning,
I pass you by, - handsome,
Twentytwoyearold. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

But I,
from poetry's skies,
plunge into communism,
because
without it
I feel no love. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

The love boat has crashed against the everyday
You and I, we are quits
And there is no use listing mutual hurts, sorrows, and pains. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

In our language rhyme is a barrel. A barrel of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line smoulders to the end and explodes; and the town is blown sky-high in a stanza. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

But I
have tamed
myself
I have stomped
on the throat
of my own song — Vladimir Mayakovsky

If you like
I'll be furious flesh elemental,
or- changing to tones that the sunset arouses- if you like-
I'll be extraordinary gentle,
not a man but - a cloud in trousers. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Our planet is poorly equipped for delight.
One must snatch gladness from the days that are.
In this life
it's not difficult to die.
To make life
is more difficult by far. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

It must be a little love, - a baby, sort of,
It shies away when the cars honk and hiss,
But adores the bells on the horse-tram. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

A chestnut-haired child
Cheering up, went
and stood in his stall.
And took the whole incident
like a young colt -
and to live seemed worthwhile,
and to labor,
worthy. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

No-one knows what huge suns will illuminate the life of the future. It may be that artists will transform the grey dust of the cities into hundred-coloured rainbows; that the never-ending thunderous music of volcanoes will be turned into the sound of flutes resounding from mountain ranges; that ocean waves will be forced to play on nets of chords ... — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Girl: The kid buys a new tie and you curse him like he was Ramsay MacDonald. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Oleg Bard: I understand, but by virtue of that power of imagination which, according to [Georgi] Plekhanov, is granted to Marxists, I can already see as through a prism, so to speak, the triumph of your class as symbolized by your sublime, ravishing, elegant, and class-conscious wedding! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

His [Mayakovsky] genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky's police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them. — Milan Kundera