“Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy — but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.”

Source: Snuff

"In Warsaw" (1945), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz, Robert Hass and Madeline Levine
Rescue (1945)
Context: How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything; five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CXV: On the Superficial Blessings

Donna Giovanna, Act IV, scene iii.

Variant: Be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

Source: Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words (1982), p. 95 (1994 edition)

Source: The Lost Boy

Song lyrics, Lionheart (1978)

Les pierres du chantier ne sont en vrac qu’en apparence, s’il est, perdu dans le chantier, un homme, serait-il seul, qui pense cathédrale.
Pilote de Guerre (1942) (translated into English as Flight to Arras)