323 Quotes by Joseph Brodsky

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

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.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

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