The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
CZESLAW MILOSZEvery 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.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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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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He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
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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?
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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
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Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?
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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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Do you know how it is when one wakes at night suddenly and asks, listening to the pounding heart: what more do you want, insatiable?
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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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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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Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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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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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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The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.
CZESLAW MILOSZ