Quotes from Czeslaw Milosz

Love means to look at yourself/ The way one looks at distant things/ For you are only one thing among many/ And whoever sees that way heals his own heart,/ Without knowing it, from various ills./ A bird and a tree say to him: Friend./ Then he wants to use himself and things/ So that they stand in the glow of ripeness./ It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:/ Who serves best doesn't always understand.

The survivors ran through the fields, escaping From themselves, knowing they wouldn't return For a hundred years. Before them were spread Those quicksands where a tree changes into nothing, Into an anti-tree, where no borderline Separates a shape from a shape, and where, Amid thunder, the golden house of is Collapses, and the word becoming ascends.

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.

Had you been able to guess bits of my destiny, Perhaps you would bear your mediocrity with more ease.

For to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.

Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.

Destruction and suffering are the school of social thought.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting.

We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth. What has no shadow has no strength to live

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he's 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

Paradigm He was aware of his task and people were waiting for his words but he was forbidden to speak. Now where he lives he is free to speak but nobody listens and, moreover, he forgot what he had to say.

A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature.

Not to know. Not to remember. With this one hope: That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.

All the crushing might of an armed state is hurled against any man who refuses to accept the New Faith. At the same time, Stalinism attacks him from within, saying his opposition is caused by his "class consciousness", just as psychoanalysts accuse their foes of wanting to preserve their complexes.

Alas, our fundamental experience is duality: mind and body, freedom and necessity, evil and good, and certainly world and God. It is the same with our protest against pain and death. In the poetry I select I am not seeking an escape from dread but rather proof that dread and reverence can exist within us simultaneously.

Sometimes the world loses its face. it becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different. When I wrote...that I accepted the salvational goal of poetry, that was exactly what I had in mind, and I still believe that poetry can either save or destroy nations.

Professional Ketman is reasoned thus: since I find myself in circumstances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best. I am like a crustacean attached to a crag on the bottom of the sea. Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind.

We leerden, dat weet jij best, heel veel. Hoe een voor een die dingen werden weggenomen die niet weggenomen mogen worden, mensen, streken, terwijl het hart niet sterft al denk je dat het nu zou moeten sterven, we glimlachen, op tafel thee en brood.

O my love, where are they, where are going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder. [from Encounter]

To tell the truth we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me.

National pride may be an absurd feeling, yet a rooster's pride as he struts about in his own yard amid the hens is biologically useful. (The Captive Mind)

Unable to restrain himself, driven by sheer love for the animal, he fired. It was a young one, so slender that what he had taken for a squirrel was not a squirrel but the shimmer of color deposited in its wake. Its body bending and unbending on the moss, it clutched its chest with its tiny paws, at the bloody patch on its little white vest. It didn't know what death was; it was trying to remove it, as if it were a spike on which it had been impaled and around which it could only pivot.

Si tan solo fuera posible detener un solo instante lo que ocurre en todas partes, congelarlo, contemplarlo como encerrado en una bola de crista, aislándolo del instante anterior y del instante posterior, y transformar así el hilo del tiempo en el océano del espacio. Pero no.

poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries.