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

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

More quotes by Czeslaw Milosz

Image
Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
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
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
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
On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.
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
Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
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.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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
We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
Czeslaw Milosz
Image
A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
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