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 MILOSZAll was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
-
-
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me. The word and the thought are over.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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?
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
You who think of us: they lived only in delusion, Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
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 -
Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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.
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 -
I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
CZESLAW MILOSZ






