Top 86 Quotes & Sayings by Czeslaw Milosz

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

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

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

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.

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.

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.

Learning To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

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.

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

Irony is the glory of slaves.

Be young forever, seasons of the earth.

The soul exceeds its circumstances.

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 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.

Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It puts what should be above things as they are. It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.

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.

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.

The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.

It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends

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.

There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

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

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

Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees, From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me. Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals, So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.

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.

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

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

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.

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

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

On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

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

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

Language is the only homeland.

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

All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence. Yet I believe you, messengers. There, where the world is turned inside out, a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts, you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

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

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

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.

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

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

He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

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 true enemy of man is generalization.

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.

Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.

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

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

All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.

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.

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

You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

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.