Czeslaw Milosz: Likeness

Czeslaw Milosz was Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Czeslaw Milosz: 212 quotes4 likes

“Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

Czeslaw Milosz

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)
Context: Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation — which is to contemplate Being.

“Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material.”

Czeslaw Milosz book The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind (1953)
Context: 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.

“Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors.
The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire.
And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Rivers Grow Small" (1963), trans. Czesław Miłosz
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

“He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.You can accuse them of any deeds you like.
Their reply will always be silence.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Child of Europe" (1946)
Daylight (1953)
Context: He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.You can accuse them of any deeds you like.
Their reply will always be silence.Their empty faces swim out of the deep dark.
You can fill them with any features desired.Proud of dominion over people long vanished,
Change the past into your own, better likeness.

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)