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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.

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
Think
Settle
Thinking
Settling
Achieved
Impulse
Finished
Allow
Enigmatic
Reality
Quests
Doe
Quest

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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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I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me. The word and the thought are over.
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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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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 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.
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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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All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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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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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
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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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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
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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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Language is the only homeland.
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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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Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
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