Czesław Miłosz Quotes

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Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually.

Czesław Miłosz
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
Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Czesław Miłosz
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
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
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
If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

Czesław Miłosz
Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors.
The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire.
And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?

Czesław Miłosz
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
When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.

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
Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles. But precisely because such an analysis of history comes closer to the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it supplies answers to all questions, answers which merely run around in a circle repeating a few formulas.

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
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
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Czesław Miłosz
A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.

Czesław Miłosz
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 heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills —
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Czesław Miłosz