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 MILOSZThe history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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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Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.
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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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From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more.
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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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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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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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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.
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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 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.
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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas.
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The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
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Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ