Pablo Neruda was a Nobel Prize–winning Chilean writer and perhaps the most influential Latin American poet of the 20th century. He is most famous for his love and passionate poetry, such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which is still one of his most popular books. Here is a collection of most magical Pablo Neruda quotes on the meaning of life, the importance of love and being in love and the significance of laughter in our daily lives.
He who does not travel,
who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.
– Pablo Neruda
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I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close. – Pablo Neruda
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Laughter is the language of the soul. – Pablo Neruda
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There are countries, there are rivers,
in your eyes,
my country is in your eyes,
I walk through them,
they light the world
through which I walk,
lovely one.
– Pablo Neruda
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A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly. – Pablo Neruda
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I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees. – Pablo Neruda
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The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. – Pablo Neruda
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When everything seems to be set to show me off as intelligent, the fool I always keep hidden takes over all that I say. – Pablo Neruda
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I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
– Pablo Neruda
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Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. – Pablo Neruda
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Of everything I have seen, it’s you I want to go on seeing: of everything I’ve touched, it’s your flesh I want to go on touching. I love your orange laughter. I am moved by the sight of you sleeping. What am I to do, love, loved one? I don’t know how others love or how people loved in the past. I live, watching you, loving you. Being in love is my nature. – Pablo Neruda
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You are like nobody since I love you. – Pablo Neruda
So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache. – Pablo Neruda
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There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle. – Pablo Neruda
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I will bring you flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. – Pablo Neruda
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You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. – Pablo Neruda
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There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny. – Pablo Neruda
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Every day you play with the light of the universe. – Pablo Neruda
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Love is not about property, diamonds and gifts. It is about sharing your very self with the world around you. – Pablo Neruda
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I love you between shadow and soul. I love you as the plant that hasn’t bloomed yet, and carries hidden within itself the light of flowers. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. Because of you, the dense fragrance that rises from the earth lives in my body, rioting with hunger for the eternity of our victorious kisses. – Pablo Neruda
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I don’t know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but it is your heart that distributes all the graces of the daybreak in my breast. – Pablo Neruda
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Life is boring, except for flowers, sunshine, your perfect legs. A glass of cold water when you are really thirsty. The way bodies fit together. Fresh and young and sweet. Coffee in the morning. These are just moments. I struggle with the in-betweens. I just want to never stop loving like there is nothing else to do, because what else is there to do? – Pablo Neruda
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To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. – Pablo Neruda
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I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life. – Pablo Neruda
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Under your skin the moon is alive. – Pablo Neruda
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Someday, somewhere, anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life. – Pablo Neruda
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Never an illness, nor the absence of grandeur, no, nothing is able to kill the best in us, that kindness, dear sir, we are afflicted with: beautiful is the flower of man, his conduct, and every door opens on the beautiful truth and never hides treacherous whispers. I always gained something from making myself better, better than I am, better than I was, that most subtle citation: to recover some lost petal of the sadness I inherited: to search once more for the light that sings inside of me, the unwavering light. – Pablo Neruda
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As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin. – Pablo Neruda
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What did the earth teach the trees?
How to speak to the sky. – Pablo Neruda
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You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. – Pablo Neruda
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Of all the fires, love is the only inexhaustible one. – Pablo Neruda
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Only a burning patience will lead to the attainment of a splendid happiness. – Pablo Neruda
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In one kiss, you’ll know all I haven’t said. – Pablo Neruda
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I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases… – Pablo Neruda
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Shyness is a condition foreign to the heart — a category, a dimension which leads to loneliness. – Pablo Neruda
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The days aren’t discarded or collected, they are bees that burned with sweetness or maddened the sting: the struggle continues, the journeys go and come between honey and pain. No, the net of years doesn’t unweave: there is no net. They don’t fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river. Sleep doesn’t divide life into halves, or action, or silence, or honor: life is like a stone, a single motion, a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves, an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal that climbs or descends burning in your bones. – Pablo Neruda
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I have named you queen. There are taller ones than you, taller. There are purer ones than you, purer. There are lovelier than you, lovelier. But you are the queen. – Pablo Neruda
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Love is so short, forgetting is so long. – Pablo Neruda
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We must dream our way. – Pablo Neruda
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We are dust and to dust return. In the end we’re neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers. – Pablo Neruda
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Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us. – Pablo Neruda
