Czeslaw Milosz Quotes - Page 2

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

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?

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.

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

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.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Irony is the glory of slaves.

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

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.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.

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

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

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.

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

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.

There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.