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.
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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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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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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From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more.
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Irony is the glory of slaves.
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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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Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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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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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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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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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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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Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.
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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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The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
CZESLAW MILOSZ