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Czesław Miłosz quotes - page 3
We go down with the bells ringing in all the sunken cities. Forgotten, we are greeted by the embassies of the dead, While your endless flowing carries us on and on; And neither is nor was. The moment only, eternal.
Czesław Miłosz
Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness had to make our agony only more acute.We needed God loving us in our weakness and not in the glory of beatitude.
Czesław Miłosz
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
Czesław Miłosz
Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
Czesław Miłosz
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.
Czesław Miłosz
Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.
Czesław Miłosz
All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
Czesław Miłosz
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Czesław Miłosz
It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
Czesław Miłosz
All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence. Yet I believe you, messengers.
Czesław Miłosz
You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
Czesław Miłosz
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of word. I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
Czesław Miłosz
Long into the night we were walking on the Piazza del Duomo. He: That I was too politicized. And I answered him more or less as follows:If you have a nail in your shoe, what then? Do you love that nail? Same with me. I am for the moon amid the vineyards When you see high up the snow on the Alps.
Czesław Miłosz
Wherever he steps, there always Endures traced in sand A large-toed footprint Which clamors to be tried out By his childish foot arriving From the virgin forests.
Czesław Miłosz
The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.
Czesław Miłosz
All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine And to know such pretending is disgraceful. But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed And started to prophesy. No one would hear me. Their screens and microphones are not for that.
Czesław Miłosz
During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.
Czesław Miłosz
They say somebody has invented you but to me this does not sound convincing for humans invented themselves as well.
Czesław Miłosz
I will neither resurrect the past nor return. Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers. I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes. Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals, its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl nest on the dead ogive.
Czesław Miłosz
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.
Czesław Miłosz
Until, when all is legend And many years have passed, On a great Campo di Fiori Rage will kindle at a poet's word.
Czesław Miłosz
I think that I am here, on this earth, To present a report on it, but to whom I don't know.
Czesław Miłosz
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