Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

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.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

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.

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.

The soul exceeds its circumstances.

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

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.

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

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

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

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.

Language is the only homeland.

The true enemy of man is generalization.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.

Be young forever, seasons of the earth.

Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually.

Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

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.

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.

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

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.

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.

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.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

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

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.

Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

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

I've always regretted that I'm made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

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

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.

Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.