Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
CZESLAW MILOSZBe young forever, seasons of the earth.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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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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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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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Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
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You who think of us: they lived only in delusion, Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!
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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.
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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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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.
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What has no shadow has no strength to live.
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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
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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.
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When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
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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.
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I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.
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A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
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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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I have defined poetry as a ‘passionate pursuit of the Real.
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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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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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When I curse Fate, it’s not me, but the earth in me.
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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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Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
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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