1.
Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.
Giorgos Seferis
2.
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
Giorgos Seferis
3.
Like a bird with broken wing
that has traveled through wind for years . . .
I sleep and my heart stays awake . . .
Giorgos Seferis
4.
You spoke about things they couldn't see and so they laughed. Yet to row up the dark river against the current, to take the unknown road blindly, stubbornly, and to search for words rooted like the knotted olive tree- let them laugh. And to yearn for the other world to inhabit today's suffocating loneliness, this ravaged present- let them be.
Giorgos Seferis
5.
They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn't know where to look.
Giorgos Seferis
6.
A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested.
Giorgos Seferis
7.
I think the Swedish Academy wished to manifest its solidarity with the living spirit of Greece today.
Giorgos Seferis
8.
Leaves like rusty tin
for the desolate mind that has seen the end-
the barest glimmerings.
Leaves aswirl with gulls
made wild by winter.
Giorgos Seferis
9.
And if the soul
Is to know itself
It is into a soul
That it must look:
The stranger and the enemy, we've seen him in the mirror.
Giorgos Seferis
