A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
CZESLAW MILOSZHe returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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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On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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?
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The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
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It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
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All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
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We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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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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I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.
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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 is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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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.
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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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ






