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.
CZESLAW MILOSZThe 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.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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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I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.
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What has no shadow has no strength to live.
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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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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 -
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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The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
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Irony is the glory of slaves.
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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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Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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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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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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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ