131 Quotes by Czesław Miłosz

You who think of us: they lived only in delusion... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It puts what should be above things as they are. It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.

Learning To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season. A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley. It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns. A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees. Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leved birches. In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon. I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy And the visible world is all that remains.

And now I am ready to keep running When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death. I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest Where, beyond every essence, a new essence awaits.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting…

You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.