Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don’t like to joke.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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There’s simply too much fuss about myself.
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I’m working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
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I don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
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Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
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This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
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When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
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And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA






