Quotes by Polish Authors - Page 11

Anybody who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
Leo Rosten
The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become--and such lucidity is a form of joy.
Eva Hoffman
Act in such a way that all those who come in contact with you will go away joyful. Sow happiness about you because you have received much from God; give, then, generously to others. They should take leave of you with their hearts filled with joy, even if they have no more than touched the hem of your garment.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.
John Paul II
Chance waited patiently until she stopped.
Jerzy Kosiński
I've never understood why the majority of human curses and insults refer to the erotic sphere. Sex is wonderful and associated with beauty, joy and pleasure. How can the names of the sexual organs be used as a vulgar synonym for ̶
Andrzej Sapkowski
Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.
Czesław Miłosz
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanisław Lem
The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Reality is as thin as paper, and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.
Bruno Schulz
The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe
Joseph Conrad
It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]
Joseph Conrad
Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.
John Paul II
The bright side of the planet moves toward darknessAnd the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,And for me, now as then, it is too much.There is too much world.
Czesław Miłosz
You can't stop a soldier from being frightened but you can give him motivation to help him overcome that fear. I have no such motivation. I can't have. I'm a witcher: an artificially created mutant. I kill monsters for money. I defend children when their parents pay me to. If Nilfgaardian parents pay me, I'll defend Nilfgaardian children. And even if the world lies in ruin - which does not seem likely to me - I'll carry on killing monsters in the ruins of this world until some monster kills me. That is my fate, my reason, my life and my attitude to the world. And it is not what I chose. It was chosen for me.
Andrzej Sapkowski
The world can't die. Many generations have thought the world was dying. But it was only their world which was dying.
Tadeusz Konwicki
Be a lover of the world, it is the only way to survive in it.
Janosch
I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.
Isaac Deutscher
The greatest obstacle to liberty is not the existence of evil rulers, but the belief in the existence of good rulers.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
…egalitarianism and despotism do not exclude each other, but usually go hand in hand. To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of a society equal, and then to maintain this equality for a long period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life: to paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, ‘We start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism.’ Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian.
Ryszard Legutko
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
Joseph Conrad
Thought assists memory in enabling it to order the material it has assembled. So that in a systematically ordered memory every idea is individually followed by all conclusions it entails.
Jan Potocki
I don't think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence.
Stanisław Lem
It would be indeed unusual if it turned out that the set of orders that our mind is able to construct and accept, having as it does a deep sense of “understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly improbable. This way of thinking, so modest in its assessment of our abilities, is probably the only way recommended, given our lack of knowledge, because we are not aware of our limitations.
Stanisław Lem
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.
Joseph Conrad
But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.
Joseph Conrad
The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--buttruth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.
Joseph Conrad
The mind of man is capable of anything.
Joseph Conrad
It’s safer/ easier to follow the script and complain how broken some things are in that script, than to attempt to change those things.
Lukasz Laniecki
We are all entitled to our own share of mistakes and learning experiences in life. No one should take them away from us. Not even our parents.
Lukasz Laniecki
There is no better way to crush someone’s self-confidence than to tell this person that her / his choice was wrong, and that she / he should have listened to us (parents). Because, obviously, we know how to make the right choices and she / he does not.
Lukasz Laniecki
Our parents are not the only people on this planet, and we should not base our life choices on what they want (what will bring them a peace of mind, satisfaction, and give them a reason to brag), but we should make those choices keeping in mind that there are upwards of 7,5 billion people in this world, and that we should use our talents and energy trying to improve the lives of as many of them as possible.
Lukasz Laniecki
Who said that parents’ beliefs should be adopted by their children?
Lukasz Laniecki
They (parents) use this guilt-tripping to stop you from fulfilling your plans, but most important, from believing something they don’t (something which contradicts their beliefs)
Lukasz Laniecki
They (parents) want life to unfold according to what they believe. Most people want that. The last thing they want and need, is somebody (let alone their own child) telling them that their beliefs about life are bullshit / full of holes/ severely flawed.
Lukasz Laniecki
They (parents) have been doing this (imposing their beliefs about life on you) since you were born. That’s more than enough to establish a habit.
Lukasz Laniecki
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
John Paul II
When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all—because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.
Eva Hoffman
In time, the witchers' steel swords earned the name of "swords for men." A foul moniker, though not one conjured out of thin air. A good steel blade is indeed our first line of defense against mankind's hatred, stupidity, or greed. The world is full of those who would happily kill a witcher - out of resentment toward our trade, for fame, or simply to profit by snatching up our hard-earned coin. So the witchers, fully aware of the situation, never hesitated to relieve this world of the burden of dolts who were so thick headed as to threaten their lives. For that reason, in my day we called our steel swords "swords for fools." Unfortunately, seeing as how mendacious the two-faced scoundrels of bitches seem to rule this world, a great many fools have been apparently spared this selection process.
Marcin Batylda
I predict a bad end for your race, humans,' Zoltan Chivay said grimly. 'Every sentient creature on this earth, when it falls into want , poverty and misfortune, usually cleaves to his own. Because it's easier to survive the bad times in a group, helping one another. But you humans, you just wait for a chance to make money from other people's mishaps. When there's hunger you don't want want to share out your food, you just devour the weakest ones. The practice works among wolves, since it lets the healthiest and strongest individuals survive. But among sentient races selection of that kind usually allows the biggest bastards to survive and dominate the rest.
Andrzej Sapkowski
Night and day the streets resounded with music, song, and the clinking of chalices and tankards, for it is well known that nothing is such thirsty work as the acquisition of knowledge.
Andrzej Sapkowski
You mistake the stars reflected in the surface of the lake at night for the heavens
Andrzej Sapkowski
He knew that the disdain for death and crazy courage of youngsters stemmed from a lack of imagination.
Andrzej Sapkowski
The first time I watched him fight, I got hard. My heart pounded in my chest, and I chewed on my lip until it bled. I vowed then I would make him mine.
Kasia Bacon
Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
Joseph Conrad
for he had acquired, as time went on, the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfillment in space and time.
Stefan Grabiński
The Witcher had a knife to his throat. He was wallowing in a wooden tub, brimfull with soapsuds, his head thrown agains the slippery rim. The bitter taste of soap lingered in his mouth as the knife, blunt as a doorknob, scraped his Adam's apple painfully and moved towards his chin with a grating sound.
Andrzej Sapkowski
Only death can finish the fight, everything else only interrupts the fighting.
Andrzej Sapkowski
He lived then before me, he lived as much as he had ever lived---a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities, a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me---the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum regular and muffled like the beating of a heart, the heart of a conquering darkness.
Joseph Conrad
Don't trust the heart, it wants your blood.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
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.
Wisława Szymborska
And then as the knives and forks began to clank softly above the white tablecloths, the violins would rise alone, now suddenly mature although tentative and unsure just a short while before; slim and narrow-waisted, they eloquently proceeded with their task, took up again the lost human cause, and pleaded before the indifferent tribunal of stars, now set in a sky on which the shapes of the instruments floated like water signs or fragments of keys, unfinished lyres or swans, an imitatory, thoughtless starry commentary on the margin of music.
Bruno Schulz
Kalkbrenner has made me an offer; that I should study with him for three years, and he will make something really - really out of me. I answered that I know how much I lack; but that I cannot exploit him, and three years is too much. But he has convinced me that I can play admirably when I am in the mood, and badly when I am not; a thing which never happens to him. After close examination he told me that I have no school; that I am on an excellent road, but can slip off the track. That after his death, or when he finally stops playing, there will be no representative of the great piano-forte school. That even if I wish it, I cannot build up a new school without knowing the old one; in a word : that I am not a perfected machine, and that this hampers the flow of my thoughts. That I have a mark in composition; that it would be a pity not to become what I have the promise of being...
Frédéric Chopin
This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.
Joseph Conrad
The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.
Emanuel Ax
...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.
Bruno Schulz
Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.
Frédéric Chopin
It was a dark story.
Joseph Conrad
Treaties are like marriage: they aren't entered in to with the thought of betrayal, and once they're concluded one shouldn't be suspicious. And if that doesn't suit somebody, they shouldn't get married. Because you can't become a cuckold without being a husband, but you'll admit that fear of wearing the horns is a pitiful and quite ridiculous justification for enforced celibacy.
Andrzej Sapkowski