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.
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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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
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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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Irony is the glory of slaves.
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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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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Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.
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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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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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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.
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Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
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Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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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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Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
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On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
CZESLAW MILOSZ