Quote

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it on the contrary, throw it wide open.

Joseph Brodsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joseph Brodsky
Age: 55 †
Born: 1940
Born: May 24
Died: 1996
Died: January 25
Author
Dramaturge
Essayist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
St. Petersburg
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky
Opens
Contrary
Tends
Mental
Ignore
Wide
Boredom
Property
Shut
Properties
Window
Bored
Equilibrium
Open
Likely
Peril
Trying
Infinity
Time
Throw

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

Image
I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward whether he is an honest man or given to lies whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
Joseph Brodsky
Image
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
In Russia, the moment a person opens his mouth you know where he's from. There's the uniformity of experience of an individual in Russia. When you're about 7 years old you get into school and you get put in this factory or this bureaucracy or whatever. The options are computable. Here it's tremendously diverse.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky