Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
CZESLAW MILOSZThe 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.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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A man should not love the moon. An ax should not lose weight in his hand. His garden should smell of rotting apples, And grow a fair amount of nettles.
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All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
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I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.
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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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I’ve always regretted that I’m made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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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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Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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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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Do you know how it is when one wakes at night suddenly and asks, listening to the pounding heart: what more do you want, insatiable?
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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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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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Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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Irony is the glory of slaves.
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Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
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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 true enemy of man is generalization.
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The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
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Learning To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
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Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
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I have defined poetry as a ‘passionate pursuit of the Real.
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Language is the only homeland.
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Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.
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Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.
CZESLAW MILOSZ