Czeslaw Milosz
The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.Collection: History
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?Collection: Poetry
At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.
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.
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.Collection: Truth
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.Collection: Remembrance
Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.Collection: Atheist
The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.Collection: Keys
The true enemy of man is generalization.Collection: Men
Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually.Collection: Evil
The soul exceeds its circumstances.Collection: Soul
Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.Collection: Men
I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.Collection: Memories
Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.Collection: Inspirational
What has no shadow has no strength to live.Collection: Shadow
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.Collection: Betrayal
All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.Collection: Ends
Language is the only homeland.Collection: Language
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.Collection: Stupidity
The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.Collection: Wise
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.Collection: Purpose
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.Collection: Forever
It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?Collection: Art
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.Collection: Philosophical
There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.Collection: Wise
A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I know no one worth my envying him.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Beautiful
If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?Collection: Mankind
I've always regretted that I'm made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.Collection: Overcoming
A man should not love the moon. An ax should not lose weight in his hand. His garden should smell of rotting apples, And grow a fair amount of nettles.Collection: Moon
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.Collection: Book
We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.Collection: Technique
He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.Collection: Names
What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.Collection: Reality
You who think of us: they lived only in delusion... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!Collection: Book
Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.Collection: Memories
When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.Collection: Sunset
And now I am ready to keep running When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death. I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest Where, beyond every essence, a new essence awaits.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Country
Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Art
When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.Collection: Fate