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
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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.
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
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.
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.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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.
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.