Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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 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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Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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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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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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Language is the only homeland.
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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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At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.
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Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy, Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: No other end of the world will there be, No other end of the world will there be.
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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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Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
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What has no shadow has no strength to live.
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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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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.
CZESLAW MILOSZ