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Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Wislawa Szymborska

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Wislawa Szymborska
Age: 88 †
Born: 1923
Born: July 2
Died: 2012
Died: February 1
Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Mechanic
Poet
Translator
Writer
Kornik
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska
Szymborska
Failing
Sustaining
Teaching
Temperature
Teacher
Fails
Dies
Required
Knowledge
Maintain
Doesn
Quickly
Life
Questions
Lead

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
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At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.
Wislawa Szymborska
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And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.
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Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Wislawa Szymborska
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely
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Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.
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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Wislawa Szymborska
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Today when two people decide upon a thoughtless and precipitate abbreviation of the physical space between them, they think, at least at that moment, that they're mutually attracted and drawn together by an overwhelming force.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I'm drowning in papers.
Wislawa Szymborska
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But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
Wislawa Szymborska
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.
Wislawa Szymborska