You who think of us: they lived only in delusion, Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!
CZESLAW MILOSZI imagine the earth when I am no more: Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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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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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
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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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 -
The 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.
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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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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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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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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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Irony is the glory of slaves.
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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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When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
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I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.
CZESLAW MILOSZ