Quote

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

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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
Country
Wall
Echoes
Emotion
Flame
Loses
Spoken
Animal
Flames
Word
Hardly
Past
Destroyed
Without
Emotions
Perishable
Nothing
Meaning
Echo

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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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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.
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Language is the only homeland.
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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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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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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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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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I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.
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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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We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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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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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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.
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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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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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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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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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I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
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