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.
CZESLAW MILOSZThe death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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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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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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Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
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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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When I curse Fate, it’s not me, but the earth in me.
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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.
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The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas.
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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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The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
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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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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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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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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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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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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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He 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.
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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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For a country without a past is nothing, a word That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning, A perishable wall destroyed by flame, An echo of animal emotions.
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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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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
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Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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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 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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Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
CZESLAW MILOSZ