It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
CZESLAW MILOSZHuman 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.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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I 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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
The true enemy of man is generalization.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
And now I am ready to keep running When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death. I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest Where, beyond every essence, a new essence awaits.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I’ve devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Irony is the glory of slaves.
CZESLAW MILOSZ






