Top 30 C Milosz Quotes
#2. 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
#3. We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live
Czeslaw Milosz
#4. When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.
Czeslaw Milosz
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
Czeslaw Milosz
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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. 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
#17. Consolation
Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
Czeslaw Milosz
#18. To some extent, I have only lived to have something to outlive. By confiding these futile remembrances to paper, I am conscious of accomplishing the most important act of my life. I was predestined to Memory.
Oscar Milosz
#19. I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
Ted Hughes
#20. Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
Czeslaw Milosz
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Solitude, my mother, tell me my life again.
Oscar Milosz
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.
Czeslaw Milosz
#30. What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Czeslaw Milosz
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