I’m working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAPoetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.
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There’s simply too much fuss about myself.
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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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I’m drowning in papers.
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Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries.
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Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don’t like to joke.
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
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We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
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Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
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It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
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At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.
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I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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Animals don’t even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. The conscious impulse to change one’s appearance is found only among humans.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA