193 Quotes by Wisława Szymborska

It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.

Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.

What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?

Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

Memory at last has what I sought.

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.