Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.
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A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.
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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
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I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
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I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.
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Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
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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.