Czeslaw Milosz

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.

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.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.

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.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

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

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.