Zbigniew Herbert Quotes

#1. A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.

Zbigniew Herbert

#2. I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience.

Zbigniew Herbert

#3. I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

Zbigniew Herbert

#4. The dead have need of fairy tales too.

Zbigniew Herbert

#5. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.

Zbigniew Herbert

#6. Be courageous when the mind deceives you Be courageous In the final account only this is important

Zbigniew Herbert

#7. Lord
I thank you for creating the world beautiful and various

and for allowing me in Your fathomless goodness to visit places which were not the sites of my daily torments

Zbigniew Herbert

#8. I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness

Zbigniew Herbert

#9. Even if we love someone very much, at times it happens that we forget about it.

Zbigniew Herbert

#10. Forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums

Zbigniew Herbert

#11. there's a terrible silence
before a predator's night

sometimes
an absurd airplane
appears in the sky

it throws out leaflets
calling for surrender

I would be happy to surrender
but I've no one to surrender to

Zbigniew Herbert

#12. Study the world's skin before you set out to look for its heart.

Zbigniew Herbert

#13. No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning.

Zbigniew Herbert

#14. And if the City falls and one survives
he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile
he shall be the City

Zbigniew Herbert

#15. We fall asleep on words / we wake among words

Zbigniew Herbert