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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.

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
Hold
Else
Nothing
Men
Clutch
Illusions
Illusion

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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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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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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We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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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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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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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.
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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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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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What has no shadow has no strength to live.
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
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On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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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.
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Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting.
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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
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Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
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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.
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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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I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
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