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.
CZESLAW MILOSZIrony is the glory of slaves.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.
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Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
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The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.
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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.
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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.
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Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.
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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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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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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.
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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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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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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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The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
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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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On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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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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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 history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
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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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A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
CZESLAW MILOSZ