Czeslaw Milosz quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Czeslaw Milosz on Wise Famous Quotes.

To tell the truth we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me.

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.

Irony is the glory of slaves.

Language is the only homeland.

You who think of us: they lived only in delusion ... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!

On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new
day of a most precious delusion.

The revolt against one's environment is usually 'shame' of one's environment.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

Of all things broken and lost, porcelain troubles me most.

The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.

All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.

Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

The soul exceeds its circumstances.

Learning
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.

Love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things for you are only one thing among many.

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.

Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.

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?

A man should not love the moon. An ax should not lose weight in his hand. His garden should smell of rotting apples And grow a fair amount of nettles.

Contradiction is an inseparable part of the human condition, and that suffices as a source of miraculousness.

Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.

Consolation
Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.

If the world is divided between Fascism and Communism, obviously Fascism must lose since it is the last, desperate refuge of the bourgeoisie

Be young forever, seasons of the earth.

When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

For to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.

I am not my own friend.
Time cuts me in two.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.

I've always regretted that I'm made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.

Had you been able to guess bits of my destiny,
Perhaps you would bear your mediocrity with more ease.

It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends

The true enemy of man is generalization.

All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.

In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.

The divinization of Man, when one abhors the order of the world as essentially evil, is a risky and self-contradictory venture.

It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

Men will clutch illusions when they have nothing else to hold onto.

Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.

Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.

A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.

Not to know. Not to remember.
With this one hope:
That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence.

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.

The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.