Czesław Miłosz Quotes

"When, as my friend suggested, I stand before Zeus (whether I die naturally, or under sentence of History)I will repeat all this that I have written as my defense.Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zius will be merciful toward people who have given themselves entirely to these hobbies, even though they are only amusing and pointless diversions. I shall say to him : "It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me." And perhaps Zeus, who does not call stamp-collectors and tulip-growers silly, will forgive."

And those who expected lightning and thunder Are disappointed. And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps Do not believe it is happening now.

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.

If only the stars contained me.
If only everything kept happening in such a way
That the so-called world opposed the so-called flesh.

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.

I was not meant to live anywhere except in Paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound. When the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.

Had you been able to guess bits of my destiny,
Perhaps you would bear your mediocrity with more ease.

To be a man and live among men is miraculous, even if we know the vile deeds and crimes that people are capable of. Every day we build together an enormous beehive with our thoughts, discoveries, inventions, works, lives. Even that analogy is hardly accurate; it is too static, since our collective work is constantly changing and displaying itself in various colors, subject to time or history. Again, this is an insufficient description, because it ignores the most important thing: that this collective creation is given life by the most private, hidden fuel of all individual aspirations and decisions. The oddity of man's exceptional calling rests principally on his being a comical being, forever immature, so that a group of children with their easy mood swings from laughter to crying is the best illustration of his lack of dignity. A few years pass, and suddenly they are adults, taking control and supposedly prepared to make pronouncements on public matters and even to take upon themselves the duties of father and mother, although it would be good if they first had an entire life of their own to prepare for this.

من يستحضـر التاريخ فهو في مأمن أبداً، لن ينهضوا الموتى كي يشهدوا ضدّه.

Christopher Robin

[In April of 1996 the international press carried the news of the death, at age seventy-five, of Christopher Robin Milne, immortalized in a book by his father, A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, as Christopher Robin.]

I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. 'Old bear,' he answered. 'I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won't go anywhere, even if I'm called in for an afternoon snack.

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.

I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

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.