131 Quotes by Czesław Miłosz

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

Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.

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.

Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.

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.

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.

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

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.