1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
page 2

Czesław Miłosz 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 Mind became a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970. In 1978 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 1980 the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1999 he was named a Puterbaugh Fellow. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he divided his time between Berkeley, California, and Kraków, Poland.

✵ 30. June 1911 – 14. August 2004   •   Other names 米禾舒, Milosh Cheslav, چسلاو میلوش
Czeslaw Milosz photo
Czeslaw Milosz: 106   quotes 4   likes

Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

“Now I am not ashamed of my defeat.
One murky island with its barking seals
Or a parched desert is enough
To make us say: yes, oui, si.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Magic Mountain" (1975), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

“How is it, Chloe, that your pretty skirt
Is torn so badly by the winds that hurt
Real people, you who, in eternity, sing
The hours, sun in your hair appearing
And disappearing? How is that your breasts
Are pierced by shrapnel, and the oak groves burn,
While you, charmed, caring not at all, turn
To run through forests of machinery and concrete
And haunt us with the echoes of your feet?”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Book in the Ruins" (1941)
Rescue (1945)

People , Appearance , Singing , Sun

“And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,
My face covered with a coat though now no one was left
Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid,
My shames not eternal, base deeds to be forgiven.
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"And the City Stood in Its Brightness" (1963), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

“I swear, there is in me no wizardry of word.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.”

Czeslaw Milosz

Przysięgam, nie ma we mnie czarodziejstwa słów.
Mówię do ciebie milcząc, jak obłok czy drzewo.
"Dedication" (1945); quoted in Conversant Essays : Contemporary Poets on Poetry (1990) edited by James McCorkle, p. 69

Tree , Silence

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

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Song On the End of the World"

Disappointment

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)

Thinking , Reality

“Long into the night we were walking on the Piazza del Duomo.
He: That I was too politicized.
And I answered him more or less as follows:If you have a nail in your shoe, what then?
Do you love that nail? Same with me.
I am for the moon amid the vineyards
When you see high up the snow on the Alps.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"In Milan" (1955), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Hass
King Popeil and Other Poems (1962)

Love , Shoe , Night

“And space, what it is like? Is it mechanical,
Newtonian? A frozen prison?
Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation
Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend
I know. I don't know, and if I did,
Still my imagination is a thousand years old.”

Czeslaw Milosz

" An Appeal" (1954)
From the Rising of the Sun (1974)

Imagination

“I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics
for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me.
The word and the thought are over.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"They Will Place There Telescreens" (1964), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

“You are a tongue of the debased,
of the unreasonable, hating themselves
even more than they hate other nations,
a tongue of informers,
a tongue of the confused,
ill with their own innocence.But without you, who am I?
Only a scholar in a distant country,
a success, without fears and humiliations.
Yes, who am I without you?
Just a philosopher, like everyone else.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"My Faithful Mother Tongue" (1968), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Pinsky
City Without a Name (1969)

Hate , Fear , Distant , Success

“I will neither resurrect the past nor return.
Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers.
I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes.
Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,
its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl
nest on the dead ogive.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Farewell" (1945), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Rescue (1945)

Cats , Sleep , Past , Dead

“I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished
No more durable than old customs, family rituals,
Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"1945" (1985), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
New Poems (1985-1987)

Family , Christmas

“Earth, what have I to do with thee?
With your meadows where dumb beasts
Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads?
What have I to do with your implacable births?
So why this gracious melancholia?
Is it because anger is no use?”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Portal" (1976), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Birth , Anger

“Wherever he steps, there always
Endures traced in sand
A large-toed footprint
Which clamors to be tried out
By his childish foot arriving
From the virgin forests.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Birth" (1947)
Daylight (1953)

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Legend" (1949), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Hass
Daylight (1953)

Past , Animals , Country

“It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.”

Czeslaw Milosz book The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind (1953)

People , Communication

“Only when two times, two forms are drawn
Together and their legibility
Disturbed, do you see that immortality
Is not very different from the present
And is for its sake. You pick a fragment
Of grenade which pierced the body of a song
On Daphnis and Chloe.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Book in the Ruins" (1941), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Rescue (1945)

Time

“When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Meaning" (1991)

World , Mountain , Bird

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Esse" (1954), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky
Uncollected Poems (1954-1969)

Tree , Suffering

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Meaning" (1991)

“Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees,
From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices
And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me.
Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning
They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals,
So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"An Hour" (1972), trans. Czesŀaw Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
From the Rising of the Sun (1974)

Life , Sense , Waiting , Sun

“The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.”

Czeslaw Milosz book The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind (1953)

Life , Way , Country

“Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.”

Czeslaw Milosz

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1980/milosz-lecture-en.html (8 December 1980)

Feeling , Time , Dependency

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Ars Poetica?"

Art , Thinking , Help

“They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for humans invented themselves as well.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"On Angels"

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Should, Should Not" (1961), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
King Popeil and Other Poems (1962)

Love

“If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Study of Loneliness" (1975), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

“I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
:day draws near
another one
do what you can.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"On Angels"

Time , Drawing

“We go down with the bells ringing in all the sunken cities.
Forgotten, we are greeted by the embassies of the dead,
While your endless flowing carries us on and on;
And neither is nor was. The moment only, eternal.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Rivers" (1980), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Dead

“On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Song On the End of the World" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19195

World , Bee

“All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine
And to know such pretending is disgraceful.
But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed
And started to prophesy. No one would hear me.
Their screens and microphones are not for that.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Not Mine"

Life , World

“Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Yellow Bicycle," trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Unattainable Earth (1986)

Memory

“During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.”

Czeslaw Milosz

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)

Literature , Support , Tree , Teachers

“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 in the lie.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Child of Europe" (1946), trans. Jan Darowski
Daylight (1953)

Truth , Lie , Travel , Tree

“From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife,
what grain will be saved?My son, believe me, nothing remains,
Only adult toil,
the furrow of fate in the palm.
Only toil,
Nothing more.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Farewell" (1945)
Rescue (1945)

Life , Fate

“A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Before Majesty" (1978), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Winter

“Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
had to make our agony only more acute.We needed God loving us in our weakness
and not in the glory of beatitude.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"To Raja Rao" (1969) (A poem written in English)
Uncollected Poems (1954-1969)

Love , God

“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?”

Czeslaw Milosz book The Captive Mind

"The Pill of Murti-Bing" (1951), trans. Jane Zielonko
The Captive Mind (1953)

Art , Literature , Science

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Dedication" (1945), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Rescue (1945)

Books , Bird , Dead

“When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Notes" (1978), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Fate

“The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation
That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets,
And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"The Fall" (1975), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Death , Sea