Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
Joseph Brodsky
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Ruins
Dear
Sight
Nothing
More quotes by Joseph Brodsky
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
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
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
Joseph Brodsky
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
I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.
Joseph Brodsky
If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Joseph Brodsky
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
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Joseph Brodsky
The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
Joseph Brodsky
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky
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
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
I don't have principles. I have nerves.
Joseph Brodsky
The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.
Joseph Brodsky
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
A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre the realization of it, for destiny.
Joseph Brodsky
When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
Joseph Brodsky
When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
Joseph Brodsky
An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
Joseph Brodsky