Top 15 Czesław Miłosz Quotes

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

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

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.

Language is the only homeland.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

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.

Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.

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.

You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.

Consolation

Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment “already”? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “cristallisation,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.