Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.

No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries.

I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.

I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.

Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.

No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.

Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre.

Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.