Top 100 Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
#1. Misfortune simply is. And when you wall it off, you do not have a clear conscience, because perhaps you are supposed to dedicate all your efforts and all your attention to it. And all you can say in your own defense is 'I want to live.
Czeslaw Milosz
#2. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#3. What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Czeslaw Milosz
#4. The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.
Czeslaw Milosz
#5. 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
#7. I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me. The word and the thought are over.
Czeslaw Milosz
#8. They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.
Czeslaw Milosz
#9. Love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things for you are only one thing among many.
Czeslaw Milosz
#10. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#11. All over the world people are now sleeping in their beds, or perhaps they are engaged in some idiotic pastime; and one might easily believe that each in his own way is doing his best to deserve destruction. But that destruction will bring no freedom.
Czeslaw Milosz
#12. Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
Czeslaw Milosz
#13. Consolation
Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
Czeslaw Milosz
#15. If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother's keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying there is no God.
Czeslaw Milosz
#16. Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
Czeslaw Milosz
#17. The worst possible sexual education: a taboo imposed by the Catholic church plus romantic literature elevating love to unreal heights plus the obscene language of my peers. After all, I was nearly born in the nineteenth century, and I have no tender feelings for it.
Czeslaw Milosz
#18. 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
#19. Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.
Czeslaw Milosz
#20. You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
Czeslaw Milosz
#21. In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.
Czeslaw Milosz
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#25. And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil,
Only beauty will call to them and save them
So that they will know how to say: this is true and that is false.
Czeslaw Milosz
#26. When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.
Czeslaw Milosz
#27. We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live
Czeslaw Milosz
#28. To tell the truth we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me.
Czeslaw Milosz
#29. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#30. The revolt against one's environment is usually 'shame' of one's environment.
Czeslaw Milosz
#31. When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
Czeslaw Milosz
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. For to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.
Czeslaw Milosz
#35. The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
Czeslaw Milosz
#36. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#37. 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
#38. And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?
Czeslaw Milosz
#39. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.
Czeslaw Milosz
#40. You who think of us: they lived only in delusion ... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!
Czeslaw Milosz
#41. 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
#42. Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
Czeslaw Milosz
#43. 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
#44. I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.
Czeslaw Milosz
#47. To whom do we tell what happened on the
Earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge
Mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up
And will stay so?
Czeslaw Milosz
#48. All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
Czeslaw Milosz
#49. In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.
Czeslaw Milosz
#50. She got out at Raspail. 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. (Esse)
Czeslaw Milosz
#51. It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
Czeslaw Milosz
#53. The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Czeslaw Milosz
#54. On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Czeslaw Milosz
#55. Sceptical Ketman is widely disseminated throughout intellectual circles. One argues that humanity does not know how to handle its knowledge or how to resolve the problems of production and division of goods.
Czeslaw Milosz
#56. 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
#58. Contradiction is an inseparable part of the human condition, and that suffices as a source of miraculousness.
Czeslaw Milosz
#59. At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.
Czeslaw Milosz
#60. When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
Czeslaw Milosz
#61. 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
#63. I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
Czeslaw Milosz
#64. It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.
Czeslaw Milosz
#65. Men will clutch illusions when they have nothing else to hold onto.
Czeslaw Milosz
#66. Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?
Czeslaw Milosz
#67. It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
Czeslaw Milosz
#68. - Most distinguished voyager, what was your eon like?
- Comic. Terror is forgotten.
Only the ridiculous is remembered by posterity.
Death from a wound, from a noose, from starvation
Is one death, but folly is uncounted and new every year.
Czeslaw Milosz
#69. All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
Czeslaw Milosz
#70. Not to know. Not to remember.
With this one hope:
That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.
Czeslaw Milosz
#71. The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
Czeslaw Milosz
#72. I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.
Czeslaw Milosz
#73. 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
#74. If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
Czeslaw Milosz
#75. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#76. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#77. The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.
Czeslaw Milosz
#78. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#79. We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
Czeslaw Milosz
#80. Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy, Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: No other end of the world will there be, No other end of the world will there be.
Czeslaw Milosz
#81. Had you been able to guess bits of my destiny,
Perhaps you would bear your mediocrity with more ease.
Czeslaw Milosz
#82. I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.
Czeslaw Milosz
#83. Learning
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
Czeslaw Milosz
#84. At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new
day of a most precious delusion.
Czeslaw Milosz
#85. A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
Czeslaw Milosz
#86. From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more.
Czeslaw Milosz
#87. 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.
Czeslaw Milosz
#88. The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.
Czeslaw Milosz
#89. Paradigm
He was aware of his task and people were waiting for his words but he was forbidden to speak. Now where he lives he is free to speak but nobody listens and, moreover, he forgot what he had to say.
Czeslaw Milosz
#90. Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Czeslaw Milosz
#91. I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.
Czeslaw Milosz
#92. The divinization of Man, when one abhors the order of the world as essentially evil, is a risky and self-contradictory venture.
Czeslaw Milosz
#93. The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.
Czeslaw Milosz
#94. Of all things broken and lost, porcelain troubles me most.
Czeslaw Milosz
#95. If the world is divided between Fascism and Communism, obviously Fascism must lose since it is the last, desperate refuge of the bourgeoisie
Czeslaw Milosz
#96. Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
Czeslaw Milosz
#97. 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
#98. 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?
Czeslaw Milosz
#99. 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 Milosz
#100. The creative act of the artist lifts him above himself by demanding full surrender. No one puts words on paper or paint on canvas, doubting. If one doubts, one does so five minutes later ...
Czeslaw Milosz
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