Quote

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

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
Life
Worse
Battle
Really
Way
Good

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

Image
I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
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
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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
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
There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on West-Running Brook.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
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
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
I don't have principles. I have nerves.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
Joseph Brodsky
Image
An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
Joseph Brodsky