Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz
Czesław Miłosz; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer, translator and diplomat. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of twenty "naïve" poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attaché in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book The Captive Mindbecame a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 June 1911
CitySeteniai, Lithuania
Czeslaw Milosz quotes about
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.
I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
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 was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.
We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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.
Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.
Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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.
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.