Czeslaw Milosz quotes

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

#Integrity #People #Silence

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Stupidity #Volume

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Purpose #Difficult #Poetry Is

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

#Betrayal #Thinking #People

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#People #Doe #What Is Poetry

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Born

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#People #Belief #After Death

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

#Inspirational #Life #Hurt

The soul exceeds its circumstances.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Soul #Circumstances

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

#Art #Echoes #Poetry

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

#Cutting #Two #End Times

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Running #Lying #Spring

What has no shadow has no strength to live.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Shadow

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.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Years #Names #Expectations

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

#Philosophy #Contradiction #Form

Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Atheist #Pain #Betrayal

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

#What Matters #Trying #Matter

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

#Change #Passion #Voice

A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I know no one worth my envying him.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Gratitude #Cheer #Flower

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.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Philosophical #Vision #Fragility

The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season. A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley. It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns. A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees. Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leved birches. In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon. I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy And the visible world is all that remains.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Country #Strong #Philosophy

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Lying #Reality #Tree

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

#Technique #Crafts #Efficiency

Irony is the glory of slaves.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Irony #Slave #Glory

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

#Ends #Rely

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

#Remembrance #Stories #Speak

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

#Book #Thinking #People

Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It puts what should be above things as they are. It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Beautiful #Book #Greek

The true enemy of man is generalization.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Men #Enemy #Generalization

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

#Falling In Love #Fall #Love Is

I 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.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Song #Book #People

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

#Deeds #Calm #Sin

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

#Believe #Enough #Human Life

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

#Sweet #Thinking #Ends

Language is the only homeland.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Language #Homeland

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.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Doors #Keys #House

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

#Real #Passionate #Pursuit

Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Bridges #Giving #Feelings

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

#Environment #Shame #Revolt

And now I am ready to keep running When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death. I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest Where, beyond every essence, a new essence awaits.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Running #Essence #Memorial

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

#Taken #Wings #White

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

#Overcoming #Impossible #Contradiction

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

#Men #Illusion #Clutch

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 Milosz

#Deeds #Safe #Remember

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

#Eye #Two #Desire

Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Mean #Looks #Way

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting…
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Running #Spring #Water

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?
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Heart #Night #Listening

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

#Night #New Day #Doubt

Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Forever #Earth #Young

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

#People #Impossible #Menace

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.
-- Czeslaw Milosz

#Acceptance #Feelings #Doe

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

#Wise #Children #Men