Quotes from Czeslaw Milosz

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.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

I was not meant to live anywhere except in Paradise. Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation. Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound. When the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved. I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.

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

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

Irony is the glory of slaves.

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

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

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

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

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

May the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocksRemind us of everything we have lost,For we have seen on our way and fallen in loveWith the world that will pass in a twinkling.

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

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

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.

You who think of us: they lived only in delusion... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

If there is no God, Not everything is permitted to man. He is still his brother's keeper And he is not permitted to sadden his brother, By saying there is no God.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.

Probably only those things are worth while which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.

The worst possible sexual education: a taboo imposed by the Catholic church plus romantic literature elevating love to unreal heights plus the obscene language of my peers. After all, I was nearly born in the nineteenth century, and I have no tender feelings for it.