Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all,...

We know ourselves only as far as we’ve been tested.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

Me—a teenager? If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me, would I need to treat her as near and dear, although she's strange to me, and distant? Shed a tear, kiss her brow for the simple reason that...

After every war someone has to tidy up.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Poetry Reading To be a boxer, or not to be there at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare— it’s time to start this cultural affair. Half came insid...

We call it a grain of sand,but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.It does just fine, without a name,whether general, particular,permanent, passing,incorrect, or apt.Our glance, our touch means not...

We live longerbut less preciselyand in shorter sentences.

Now enter, single file, the hosts who died early on,in Acts 3 and 4, or between scenes.The miraculous return of all those lost without a trace. The thought that they’ve been waiting patiently offstage...

De vreugde van het schrijven.

How many, after a shorter or longer life (if they still see a difference), good, because it’s beginning, bad, because it’s over (if they don’t prefer the reverse),

Memories come to mind like excavated statuesthat have misplaced their heads.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Some people flee some other people. In some country under a sun and some clouds. They abandon something close to all they’ve got, sown fields, some chickens, dogs, mirrors in which fire now preens. Th...

¿Y si todo esto sucede en un laboratorio? ¿Bajo sólo una lámpara de día y miles de millones por la noche?

When I pronounce the word Future,the first syllable already belongs to the past.When I pronounce the word Silence,I destroy it.

AstonishmentWhy after all this one and not the rest?Why this specific self, not in a nest, But a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?Why on earth now, on Tue...

Would we really be driven to darkest despair by the news that life doesn’t exist beyond Earth? (…) But let’s stop and think about such a revelation. Would that really be the worst of all possible news...