Quote

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

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
Truth
Sounds
Like
Shots
Unanimously
People
Integrity
Pistol
Room
Pistols
Rooms
Maintaining
Silence
Conspiracy
Word
Maintain
Sound
Shot

More quotes by Czeslaw Milosz

Image
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.
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
Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It puts what should be above things as they are. It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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
All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
The true enemy of man is generalization.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I know no one worth my envying him.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
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
What has no shadow has no strength to live.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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