When I curse Fate, it’s not me, but the earth in me.
CZESLAW MILOSZThe living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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?
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy, Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: No other end of the world will there be, No other end of the world will there be.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
For a country without a past is nothing, a word That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning, A perishable wall destroyed by flame, An echo of animal emotions.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
You who think of us: they lived only in delusion, Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
CZESLAW MILOSZ