Quote

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

Czeslaw Milosz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Czeslaw Milosz
Age: 93 †
Born: 1911
Born: June 30
Died: 2004
Died: August 14
Diplomat
Essayist
Pedagogue
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Clarksburg
West Virginia
Miłosz
Czelaw Milosz
Remembrance
Longer
Story
Living
Speak
Tell
Stories

More quotes by Czeslaw Milosz

Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
The true enemy of man is generalization.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
Czeslaw Milosz