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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

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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
Life
Vision
Mist
Condenses
Lasts
Organisms
Scatters
Moment
Unbelievable
Tenuous
Death
Screen
Partition
Moments
Screens
Fragility
Human
Philosophical
Separating
Humans
Shape
Organism
Kind
Shapes
Suggests

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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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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.
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The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
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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.
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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.
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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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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.
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The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
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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.
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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.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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.
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The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.
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At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.
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All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
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We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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What has no shadow has no strength to live.
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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.
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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.
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