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 MILOSZFor 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.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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 -
I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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 -
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
CZESLAW MILOSZ