The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
CZESLAW MILOSZConsolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.
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Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting.
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From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more.
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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.
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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.
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I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me. The word and the thought are over.
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You who think of us: they lived only in delusion, Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!
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The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas.
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Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
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When I curse Fate, it’s not me, but the earth in me.
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And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?
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The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.
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Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
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It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.
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Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
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A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
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Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.
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I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
CZESLAW MILOSZ