Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
CZESLAW MILOSZAll of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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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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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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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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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The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.
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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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Language is the only homeland.
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
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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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On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
CZESLAW MILOSZ -
Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.
CZESLAW MILOSZ