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 MILOSZI imagine the earth when I am no more: Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
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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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The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
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I have defined poetry as a ‘passionate pursuit of the Real.
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I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.
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The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.
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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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When I curse Fate, it’s not me, but the earth in me.
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Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.
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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.
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We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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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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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.
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Irony is the glory of slaves.
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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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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.
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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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The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
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Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
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When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
CZESLAW MILOSZ