Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) was a Polish poet, essayist, and Nobel Laureate in Literature, renowned for his exploration of exile, identity, and morality. Born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, he experienced a multicultural upbringing that influenced his writing. Miłosz worked as a diplomat during World War II and defected to the West in 1951, eventually teaching at UC Berkeley. His notable works include “The Captive Mind” and “The Issa Valley.” Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, Miłosz is celebrated for his profound literary contributions that reflect the spiritual and moral dilemmas of the 20th century.
Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
1. “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
2. “The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
3. “Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an afterlife. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
4. “The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
5. “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
6. “The true enemy of man is generalization.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
7. “The soul exceeds its circumstances.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
8. “Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
9. “What has no shadow has no strength to live.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
10. “Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
11. “Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
12. “I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
13. “All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
14. “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
15. “The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
16. “Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
17. “Language is the only homeland.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
18. “Be young forever, seasons of the earth.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
19. “At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
20. “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
21. “Love means to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things for you are only one thing among many.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
22. “The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
23. “All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence. Yet I believe you, messengers. There, where the world is turned inside out, a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts, you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
24. “Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
25. “Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
26. “It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
27. “Do you know how it is when one wakes at night suddenly and asks, listening to the pounding heart: what more do you want, insatiable?”
— Czeslaw Milosz
28. “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.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
29. “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
30. “Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
31. “It isn’t pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?”
— Czeslaw Milosz
32. “Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
33. “Learning to believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
34. “I have defined poetry as a ‘passionate pursuit of the Real.'”
— Czeslaw Milosz
35. “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
36. “On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
37. “Consolation: Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
38. “I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
39. “The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
40. “Irony is the glory of slaves.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
41. “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.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
42. “You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
43. “The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
44. “Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
45. “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
46. “What is poetry which does not save nations or people?”
— Czeslaw Milosz
47. “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.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
48. “Two attributes of a poet: avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
49. “The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
50. “It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
51. “There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
52. “Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees, From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me. Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals, So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
53. “A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I know no one worth my envying him.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
54. “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.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
55. “If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?”
— Czeslaw Milosz
56. “I’ve always regretted that I’m made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
57. “Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
58. “A man should not love the moon. An ax should not lose weight in his hand. His garden should smell of rotting apples, And grow a fair amount of nettles.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
59. “They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
60. “We have become indifferent to content, and react, above all, to forms. The sciences, for instance, are so specialized that it’s rare for a person to find anything in them which might relate directly to his own life.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
61. “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
62. “This does not mean, of course, that we know what reality is.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
63. “Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What was promised us, and by whom?”
— Czeslaw Milosz
64. “The soul of a poet does not age as rapidly as the soul of a philosopher because the poet always considers himself to be a first-year student.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
65. “There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
66. “For I have had my vision.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
67. “In a room where people maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
68. “Who says the eternal illumination of the self Must only be of the soul?”
— Czeslaw Milosz
69. “When the time comes, let me die without fuss, Like the animals that were my companions in this world.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
70. “He who invokes history is always secure. The dead will not rise to witness against him.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
71. “Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
72. “Only a hint of our lineage. Only a drop of our blood.”
— Czeslaw Milosz
