193 Quotes by Wisława Szymborska

I have no idea who dreamed up the idiotic notion that summer vacations require "light" reading. Just the opposite, since the "light" books get read—if any reading's done at all—before bedtime, after the office work and house work, when we lack the concentration required for heavier fare.

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.The self-critical jackal does not exist.The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it.The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.

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.

Not faith in the beyond, but only doubt can make you, sorry soul, a bit less wretched.

My identifying features are rapture and despair.

Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It's in its nature not to stay: Today is always gone tomorrow.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,but what I reject is more numerous,denser, more demanding than before.A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.