Joseph Brodsky Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

Joseph Brodsky
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Joseph Brodsky
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your own skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs.

Joseph Brodsky
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Joseph Brodsky
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

Joseph Brodsky
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.

Joseph Brodsky
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Joseph Brodsky
Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.

Joseph Brodsky
The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.

Joseph Brodsky
It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours.

Joseph Brodsky
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem . . . some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.

Joseph Brodsky
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously. Sometimes people say, "The best things you have written were when you were nineteen." But I don't think I'm a Rimbaud.

Joseph Brodsky
We all knew the name Eliot. For any Eastern European, Eliot is a kind of Anglo-Saxon brand name.

Joseph Brodsky
That was the place where I lived with my parents. [...] To a stranger, to a foreigner especially, it looked really like a cave; you had to walk through a wooden wardrobe with no back, like a kind of a gate. I lived there quite a lot. However, I used every bit of money that I made to try to rent or sublet a place for myself, merely because at that age you would rather live someplace other than with your parents, ya? Girls, and so forth.

Joseph Brodsky
After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.

Joseph Brodsky
Had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth.... I believe... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens.

Joseph Brodsky
The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

Joseph Brodsky
A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.

Joseph Brodsky
Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.

Joseph Brodsky
Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.

Joseph Brodsky
At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

Joseph Brodsky
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.

Joseph Brodsky
In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

Joseph Brodsky
If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

Joseph Brodsky