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Czesław Miłosz
79 quotes
“And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned, My face covered with a coat though now no one was left Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid, My shames not eternal, base deeds to be forgiven. And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: And the City Stood in Its Brightness" (1963), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott
“I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church lift its hand, only once, just once, for me. But I understand that signs must be human, therefore call one man, anyone on earth, not me — after all I have some decency — and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Veni Creator" (1961), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky
“You are a tongue of the debased, of the unreasonable, hating themselves even more than they hate other nations, a tongue of informers, a tongue of the confused, ill with their own innocence.But without you, who am I? Only a scholar in a distant country, a success, without fears and humiliations. Yes, who am I without you? Just a philosopher, like everyone else.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Faithful Mother Tongue" (1968), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Pinsky
“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.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Esse" (1954), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky
“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 (1911–2004) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Raja Rao" (1969) (A poem written in English)
“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.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Hour" (1972), trans. Czesŀaw Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
“And space, what it is like? Is it mechanical, Newtonian? A frozen prison? Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend I know. I don't know, and if I did, Still my imagination is a thousand years old.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Appeal" (1954)
“Now I am not ashamed of my defeat. One murky island with its barking seals Or a parched desert is enough To make us say: yes, oui, si.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Magic Mountain" (1975), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
“If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Study of Loneliness" (1975), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
“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.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Fall" (1975), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
“When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes" (1978), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
“A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Before Majesty" (1978), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
“Earth, what have I to do with thee? With your meadows where dumb beasts Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads? What have I to do with your implacable births? So why this gracious melancholia? Is it because anger is no use?”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Portal" (1976), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
“Under various names, I have praised only you, rivers! You are milk and honey and love and death and dance. From a spring in hidden grottoes, seeping from mossy rocks, Where a goddess pours live water from a pitcher, At clear streams in the meadow, where rills murmur underground, Your race and my race begin, and amazement, and quick passage.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rivers" (1980), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
“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 (1911–2004) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rivers" (1980), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
“Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there. By its river. Listening to its birds. In its season: in summer, shortly after sunrise. I would get up and run to my thousand works And the garden was superterrestrial, owned by imagination.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How It Should Be in Heaven" (1986), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Hass
“But where is our, dear to us, mortality? Where is time that both destroys and saves us? This is too difficult for me. Peace eternal Could have no mornings and no evenings, Such a deficiency speaks against it.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How It Should Be in Heaven" (1986), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Hass
“I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1945" (1985), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
“Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation — which is to contemplate Being.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)
“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 (1911–2004) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)
“I have known many Christians — Poles, Frenchman, Spaniards — who were strict Stalinists in the field of politics but who retained certain inner reservations, believing God would make corrections once the bloody sentences of the all-mighties of History were carried out. They pushed their reasoning rather far. They argue that history develops according to immutable laws that exist by the will of God; one of these laws is the class struggle; the twentieth century marks the victory of the proletariat, which is led in its struggle by the Communist Party; Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party, fulfills the law of history or in other words acts by the will of God, therefore one must obey him. Mankind can be renewed only on the Russian pattern; that is why no Christian can oppose the one — cruel, it is true — idea which will create a new kind of man over the entire planet. Such reasoning is often used by clerics who are party tools. "Christ is a new man. The new man is a Soviet man. Therefore Christ is a Soviet man!" said Justinian Marina, the Rumanian patriarch.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic. Such experiences are associated with works of art for only an insignificant number of individuals. The majority find pleasure of an aesthetic nature in the mere fact of their existence within the stream of life. In the cities, the eye meets colorful store displays, the diversity of human types. Looking at passers-by, one can guess from their faces the story of their lives. This movement of the imagination when a man is walking through a crowd has an erotic tinge; his emotions are very close to physiological sensations.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is the significance of the lives of the people he passes, of the senseless bustle, the laughter, the pursuit of money, the stupid animal diversions? By using a little intelligence he can easily classify the passers-by according to type; he can guess their social status, their habits and their preoccupations. A fleeting moment reveals their childhood, manhood, and old age, and then they vanish. A purely physiological study of one particular passer-by in preference to another is meaningless. If one penetrates into the minds of these people, one discovers utter nonsense. They are totally unaware of the fact that nothing is their own, that everything is part of their historical formation — their occupations, their clothes, their gestures and expressions, their beliefs and ideas. They are the force of inertia personified, victims of the delusion that each individual exists as a self. If at least these were souls, as the Church taught, or the monads of Leibnitz! But these beliefs have perished. What remains is an aversion to an atomized vision of life, to the mentality that isolates every phenomenon, such as eating, drinking, dressing, earning money, fornicating. And what is there beyond these things? Should such a state of affairs continue? Why should it continue? Such questions are almost synonymous with what is known as hatred of the bourgeoisie.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As long as a society's best minds were occupied by theological questions, it was possible to speak of a given religion as the way of thinking of the whole social organism. All the matters which most actively concerned the people were referred to it and discussed in its terms. But that belongs to a dying era. We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought that could unite the peasant cutting his hay, the student poring over formal logic, and the mechanic working in an automobile factory. Out of this lack arises the painful sense of detachment or abstraction that oppresses the "creators of culture.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced to rubble — kilometers of streets on which there remained no trace of life, not even a cat, not even a homeless dog — emerged with a rather ironic attitude toward descriptions of the hell of the big city by contemporary poets, descriptions of the hell in their own souls. A real "wasteland" is much more terrible than any imaginary one. Whoever has not dwelt in the midst of horror and dread cannot know how strongly a witness and participant protests against himself, against his own neglect and egoism. Destruction and suffering are the school of social thought.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night When we face only night, the ticking of a watch, the whistle of an express train, tell me Whether you really think that this world Is your home? That your internal planet That revolves, red-hot, propelled by the current Of your warm blood, is really in harmony With what surrounds you? Probably you know very well The bitter protest, every day, every hour, The scream that wells up, stifled by a smile, The feeling of a prisoner who touches a wall And knows that beyond it valleys spread, Oaks stand in summer splendor, a jay flies And a kingfisher changes a river to a marvel.”
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Appeal" (1954), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass