Quotes by Polish Authors - Page 10

There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort.
Ryszard Kapuściński
Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.
Tadeusz Konwicki
I see the process of reaching out, sharing yourself, communicating, establishing contact between two people as similar to, if not the same as, the interaction between two people entering a relationship in literature – that is, as reader and writer. Both seem to have the same astounding possibilities and the same terrible pitfalls. But if you battle through and souls touch, magic happens. Love. We feel more human, more alive, more understood, naked and yet protected from the cold of isolation and indifference. Our loneliness is, temporarily, held at bay.
Karina Szczurek
Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
Witold Gombrowicz
It is not science which leads to unbelief but rather ignorance. The ignorant man thinks he understands something provided that he sees it every day. The natural philosopher walks amid enigmas, always striving to understand and always half-understanding. He learns to believe what he does not understand, and that is a step on the road to faith.
Jan Potocki
Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
They weren't lying. They firmly believed it all. Which doesn't change the facts.
Andrzej Sapkowski
I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
Stanisław Lem
A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting.
Stanisław Lem
When I pronounce the word Future,the first syllable already belongs to the past.When I pronounce the word Silence,I destroy it.
Wisława Szymborska
The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.
Jacob Bronowski
When I was a boy I felt that the roll of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the un-obvious- because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel associations, and almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomes, paradoxically, a sort of automatic mechanism of originality.
Stanislaw Ulam
All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
Joseph Conrad
When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
Frédéric Chopin
Where does destiny end and choice begin?
Eva Stachniak
The sword of destiny has two edges. You are one of them.
Andrzej Sapkowski
I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had knownhow to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humblesurroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war--inall the exalted elements of romance.
Joseph Conrad
They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies.
Bruno Schulz
Then the prophetess said to the witcher: "I shall give you this advice: wear boots made of iron, takein hand a staff of steel. Then walk until the end of the world. Help yourself with your staff to break the land before you and wet it with your tears. Go through fire and water, do not stop along the way,do not look behind you. And when the boots are worn, when your staff is blunt, once the wind and the heat has dried your eyes so that your tears no longer flow, then at the end of the world you mayfind what you are looking for and what you love...The witcher went through fire and water, he did not look back. He did not take iron boots or a staffof steel. He took only his sword. He did not listen to the words of prophets. And he did well because she was a bad prophet.
Andrzej Sapkowski
We live longerbut less preciselyand in shorter sentences.
Wisława Szymborska
Leave me, and go to another, but never stand alone
Oliwier Ernest Brzezinski
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
Czesław Miłosz
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
Joseph Conrad
I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
Leo Rosten
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of our truth about the unique history of our childhood.
Alice MIller
Cruelty is the opposite of love, and its traumatic effect, far from being reduced, is actually reinforced if it is presented as a sign of love.
Alice MIller
The public forum is not, of course, the most helpful place to conduct a profitable confrontation with one's parents. If we are to allow the feelings of childhood to be revived, we need an enlightened witness and not the pent-up, undigested hatred of formerly abused children who, as adults, totally identify with the perpetrators. To expose oneself defenselessly to public view while harboring such feelings from childhood can amount to a kind of self-inflicted punishment, something one seeks when, in spite of everything, one still feels guilty at having expressed the criticism and is prepared to accept hate reactions as a well deserved punishment.
Alice MIller
Not to take one's own suffering seriously, to make light of it or even to laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture.
Alice MIller
A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one.
Alice MIller
Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his "false self." This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.
Alice MIller
Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.
Alice MIller
When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.
John Paul II
Society is a voluntary scheme of mutual benefit. The state is a compulsory scheme of mutual exploitation.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Individual liberty may be unable to solve every social problem, but collective violence is unable to solve any social problem.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Individualism turns a band into a society. Collectivism turns society into a mob.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Young adults rebel against the pre-invented/ packaged world, but sooner or later they stop and they also become proponents of the tried and true.
Lukasz Laniecki
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous--so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction.
Joseph Conrad
There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.
Joseph Conrad
He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.
Joseph Conrad
I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.
Joseph Conrad
We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.
Stanisław Lem
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously, and to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be. 'The unknown person' inside of them is our hope for the future.
Janusz Korczak
To reform the world - means to reform upbringing...
Janusz Korczak
The people who run the circus kidnapped us from our parents. Since we got here, we have all been working in the circus. We can’t see any of our mummies or kiss them OR cuddle up to them. said Adrian.His tears flowing in his big blue eyes that were the colour of the sky. We didn’t want to listen to our parents when they told us: ‘Never, Ever!” talk to strangers. We all disobeyed and spoke to strangers, and then the strangers stole us away from our parents.
Magda M. Olchawska
Me & my fellow fairies are running away from a huge monster that keeps destroying our home land,sobbed Farina.The monster is terribly scary,has huge jaws, creates clouds of smoke & makes loads of noise everywhere it goes.
Magda M. Olchawska
Mikolay had explored the big attic many times before, and he knew that his mummy misplaced boxes all the time. Ah, I,don’t really want a wand, um, that much. Can we go home now? “Please? begged Julia as she walked toward the door. But Mikolay grabbed her hand and whispered:Lets just see where the shadow is going and after that, we can go right home.Mikolay and Julia carefully moved closer and closer to the wall.
Magda M. Olchawska
Mikolay took his wand out, touched the cage’s lock and said: “Eis Izras” three times. The door opened at once, unfortunately making lots of noise and waking the humans up. Mikolay knew a few powerful hexes and he was able to create small flying dragons. He hoped that he could stop the people, animals, and block the shadows to buy some time.
Magda M. Olchawska
Wow!” gasped Julia. They saw 20 or more young children of every sort lyingon the cold, bare ground.
Magda M. Olchawska
Suddenly, the shadow disappeared through the wall! Maybe the shadow disappeared again.Can we please go back home now?I really don’t like it here & I’m scared! Julia pleaded.The shadow was standing by a very small cage, pointing its long, thin finger towards the floor.
Magda M. Olchawska
We need to get to the other side of the lake if you want to help the fairies,” said Mikolay.We could use my crystal ball for transportation,” suggested Julia pulling out a small crystal ball out of her pocket.
Magda M. Olchawska
We live in the fairy forest of huge trees which is on the other side of the lake, said Farina.
Magda M. Olchawska
When Mikolay and Julia are not at school, they usually go exploring and adventuring. Mikolay’s and Julia’s mummies are both witches and are in charge of fixing things.
Magda M. Olchawska
Come on, this is a real adventure I have here, screamed Mikolay again, this time more impatiently.I think someone is singing inside the wardrobe. Can you hear that?
Magda M. Olchawska
I love fairies so much. I would so love to touch one, whispered Julia in excitement. “U can touch me.But please don't touch my wings,they are very fragile,”replied 1 fairy.“I’m Farina,the fairy queen.
Magda M. Olchawska
Many trees were pulled out of the ground with their roots crying for water.” The lake was all polluted with thick layers of grease,the grass & flowers were squashed, animals walked around. #kidsbooks "Mikolay & Julia"Total elocological destruction,said Mikolay trying to use one of the funny long words Julia was always using.These are not monsters Farina.These are people and building machines.
Magda M. Olchawska
Julia really likes school and she is one of the top students. Mikolay doesn’t mind the weekend school because he is allowedto do lots of magic, which he really likes and is very good at.
Magda M. Olchawska
The room was full of magical objects, animals, photographs, paintings, strange looking plants and many flying books. I only found this room a few days ago and it seems that it keeps changing every time I come.
Magda M. Olchawska
Julia heard from her mummy that fairies were gentle creatures with singing voices just like the mermaids.
Magda M. Olchawska
But our forest is sacred & magical with many unusual creatures & plants.We don’t want people to destroy everything!
Magda M. Olchawska