Joseph Brodsky Quotes (17 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

"A Commencement Address" (1984), delivered at Williams College; As quoted in: Robert Inchausti (2014) Thinking through Thomas Merton. p. 110
Context: The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your own skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs.

“Man is what he reads.”

Joseph Brodsky

“Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.”

Joseph Brodsky

“It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being.”

Joseph Brodsky book Less Than One: Selected Essays

Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

“The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time.”

Joseph Brodsky book Less Than One: Selected Essays

Source: Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986), p. 28
Context: The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.

“The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.”

Joseph Brodsky

“The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.”

Joseph Brodsky book Watermark

Source: Watermark

“After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.”

Joseph Brodsky

“For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”

Joseph Brodsky

“Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.”

Joseph Brodsky

“This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed’s.”