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 voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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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Language is the only homeland.
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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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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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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. 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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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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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.
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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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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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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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Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ