Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Wislawa Szymborska

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

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.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

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.

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

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

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

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

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

After every war someone has to tidy up.

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

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

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.

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 life's wisdom.

I'm drowning in papers.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

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

I don't believe I have a mission. Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

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.

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

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.

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

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

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.

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

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

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

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.

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

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.

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

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

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

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

I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely

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.

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

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.'

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

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

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

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

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