Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Giorgos Seferis

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Greek poet Giorgos Seferis.

Last updated on December 18, 2024.

Giorgos or George Seferis, the pen name of Georgios Seferiades, was a Greek poet and diplomat. He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and a Nobel laureate. He was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962.

Greek - Poet | March 13, 1900 - September 20, 1971

Source: Wikipedia

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Giorgos Seferis

Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Giorgos Seferis

I think the Swedish Academy wished to manifest its solidarity with the living spirit of Greece today.

Giorgos Seferis

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

For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.

Giorgos Seferis

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

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

Like a bird with broken wing that has traveled through wind for years . . . I sleep and my heart stays awake . . .

Giorgos Seferis

They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn't know where to look.

Giorgos Seferis

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

A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested.

Giorgos Seferis