Czesław Miłosz Short Quotes

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

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

Czesław Miłosz
Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.

Czesław Miłosz
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

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

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

Czesław Miłosz
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

Czesław Miłosz
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

Czesław Miłosz
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for humans invented themselves as well.

Czesław Miłosz
What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.

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

Czesław Miłosz
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
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
A man should not love the moon.
An ax should not lose weight in his hand.
His garden should smell of rotting apples
And grow a fair amount of nettles.

Czesław Miłosz
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.

Czesław Miłosz
For a country without a past is nothing, a word
That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning,
A perishable wall destroyed by flame,
An echo of animal emotions.

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 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
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
— And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?

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
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.

Czesław Miłosz
May the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocks Remind us of everything we have lost, For we have seen on our way and fallen in love With the world that will pass in a twinkling.

Czesław Miłosz
I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith
but I received strength, it tears the world apart.
I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores
and a young wave will cover my trace.

Czesław Miłosz
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
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

Czesław Miłosz
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Czesław Miłosz
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
From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife,
what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains,
Only adult toil,
the furrow of fate in the palm.
Only toil,
Nothing more.

Czesław Miłosz