Czeslaw Milosz Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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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 MiloszSource : Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 8, 1980.
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“The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”
-- Czeslaw MiloszSource : Czeslaw Milosz, “Account”
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“The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“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 -
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“What is poetry which does not save nations or people?”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“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 -
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“Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“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 -
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“What has no shadow has no strength to live.”
-- Czeslaw MiloszSource : Czeslaw Milosz, “Faith”
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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.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“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 -
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“You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.”
-- Czeslaw MiloszSource : Czeslaw Milosz, “Child Of Europe”
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“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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 MiloszSource : "Child of Europe" sec. 4 (1946) (translation by Jan Darowski)
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“We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
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“All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“You who think of us: they lived only in delusion... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“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 -
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“The true enemy of man is generalization.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz -
“Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.”
-- Czeslaw Milosz
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