Quotes by Polish Authors - Page 6

Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns--nicht wahr?. . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me--how to be?
Joseph Conrad
It doesnot matter; there’s many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us ofa night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphereof its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to theastronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of itslight--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering.
Joseph Conrad
The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.
Joseph Conrad
If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
Joseph Rotblat
Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.
John Paul II
It takes abstract thinking to see how greed can lead to prosperity, but it takes wishful thinking to claim that violence can lead to charity.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.
Alice MIller
A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
John Paul II
Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to the validity of the ultimate ideals and values that fluctuates rather than the ultimate ideals and values?
Abraham Joshua Heschel
An anarchist is someone who rejects the curious notion that crimes become virtues as they grow in size.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Patience is the ability to enjoy the calm of boredom.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.
John Paul II
The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.
Czesław Miłosz
This is what I always said to André: you never know. You never know what the future may bring. I just knew that whatever time we had together, whether one year or thirty-four, I wanted it. I wanted him. Regardless of the consequences. When a love like that comes your way, you grab, hold, cherish it – you live it. You don’t allow it to pass by. It is rare and precious. If you are lucky, you’ll have it once in a lifetime. Will I be allowed to live it twice? I doubt it, even if I wish it were possible. Periodically, I sit quietly and stare into space and understand that I am only forty, and it is behind me.
Karina Szczurek
By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.
Isaac Deutscher
A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To claim that one can be happy without being free is to prove that one has no idea what happiness means.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
A slave believes that the law should define the scope of liberty. A free person believes that liberty should define the scope of the law.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
The only common good is the common liberty to pursue individual goods.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Politics is an endless, borderless war against individual liberty.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
The goal of libertarianism is not to permit people to be free, but to make them realize that they don't need anyone's permission to be free.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To eliminate statism is not to physically subdue the rulers, but to mentally liberate the ruled.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.
Bruno Schulz
They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.
Bruno Schulz
Because the victims are “only children,” their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years’ time these children will be adult who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children. They may consciously fight with vigor against cruelty in the world yet carry within themselves an experience of cruelty that they may unconsciously inflict on others. As long as it remains hidden behind their idealized picture of a happy childhood, they will have not awareness of it and will therefore be unable to avoid passing it on.It is absolutely urgent that people become aware of the degree to which this disrespect of children is persistently transmitted from one generation to the next, perpetuating destructive behavior. Someone who slaps or hits another adult or knowingly insults her is aware of hurting her. Even if he doesn’t know why he is doing this, he has some sense of what he is doing. But how often were our parents, and we ourselves toward our own children, unconscious of how painfully, deeply, and abidingly they and we injured a child’s tender, budding self?
Alice MIller
I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.
Stanisław Lem
Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.
Stanisław Lem
Simulant - something that doesn't exist but pretends to....Dissimulant - an object that exists but pretends not to.
Stanisław Lem
I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Stanisław Lem
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Sholem Asch
Why didn't you become a sorcerer, Geralt? Weren't you ever attracted by the Art? Be honest.''I will. I was.''Why, then, didn't you follow the voice of that attraction?''I decided it would be wiser to follow the voice of good sense.''Meaning?''Years of practice in the witcher's trade have taught me not to bite off more than I can chew. Do you know, Vilgefortz, I once knew a dwarf, who, as a child, dreamed of being an elf. What do you think; would he have become one had he followed the voice of attraction?
Andrzej Sapkowski
The sleep of reason encourages the elections.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single typeof propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see such a notion as not even admissible, if at all desirable. The world of these academic refuseniks is, however, a bleak and sterile place. Disarmed by their own epistemic fiat, scholars cannot assert anything since they deny the idea of objective rationality. If they arrive at an insight whose truth they wish to defend – for example that truth and rationality are passé – they can’t do so because truth and rationality are constructed to be constructed.
Peter Swirski
We are staring at each other, forgetting about the harsh reality and I can feel my heart reacting. He touches my cheek and the familiar electric current runs through me. His hands are warm, caressing my pale skin. His deep-blue eyes are filled with serenity and passion. I keep telling myself to breathe, but I am unable to exhale the air from my lungs. Then he leans forward and his lips touch mine, increasing the temperature in my body. He kisses me gently, trying to break his way through, testing to see if I let him in. His lips are sweet and warm. A few seconds later it is all over and he disappears once again, leaving me uncontrollably awake and trying to gather my wild thoughts.
Joanna Mazurkiewicz
... Once a penguin finds its perfect other penguin, they stay together pretty much forever.
Anna Staniszewski
[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.
Ryszard Kapuściński
Artist must have an all-or-nothing attitide. Otherwise they will bite his head off and there will be no artist.
Kata Mlek
I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.
Joseph Conrad
He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?
Joseph Conrad
[on Rouge] This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
I must admit that when I chose the name, 'vitamine,' I was well aware that these substances might later prove not to be of an amine nature. However, it was necessary for me to choose a name that would sound well and serve as a catchword, since I had already at that time no doubt about the importance and the future popularity of the new field.
Casimir Funk
O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! (...) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of some one dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.... Pass the bottle.
Joseph Conrad
You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.
Joseph Conrad
O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight--to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret--as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle.
Joseph Conrad
If one is seeking for Heaven on earth, has slept in geography class.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
If there is no God,Not everything is permitted to man.He is still his brother's keeperAnd he is not permitted to sadden his brother,By saying there is no God.
Czesław Miłosz
I am telling himwhat he wants to hear: antsdying of love underthe constellation of the dandelion.I swear that a white rose,sprinkled with wine, sings.I am laughing, tiltingmy head carefullyas if checking an invention.I am dancing, dancingin astonished skin, inan embrace that creates me.
Wisława Szymborska
Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.
Czesław Miłosz
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all. Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
Wisława Szymborska
Professional Ketman is reasoned thus: since I find myself in circumstances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best. I am like a crustacean attached to a crag on the bottom of the sea. Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind.
Czesław Miłosz
There too he had been treated with revolting injustice. His struggles, his privations,his hard work to raise himself in the social scale, hadfilled him with such an exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult for the world to treat him with justice— the standard of that notion depending so much upon the patience of the individual. The Professor had genius, but lacked the great social virtue of resignation.
Joseph Conrad
Humility is the proper attitude towards all true greatness, including one's own greatness as a human being, but above all towards the greatness which is not oneself, which is beyond one's self
Karol Wojtyla
Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.
Leszek Kołakowski
The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted...Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
As a childI put my finger in the fireto becomea saint.As a teenagerevery day I would knock my head against the wall.As a young girlI went out through a window of a garretto the roofin order to jump.As a womanI had lice all over my body.They cracked when I was ironing my sweater.I waited sixty minutesto be executed.I was hungry for six years.Then I bore a child,they were carving mewithout putting me to sleep.Then a thunderbolt killed methree times and I had to rise from the dead three timeswithout anyone’s help.Now I am restingafter three resurrections.
Anna Swir
She smelled like water that had been warmed by the sun, and she also had the sharp, enticing aroma of birch leaves.
Tadeusz Konwicki
Nobody is sure of his life, property and health when the parliament deliberates.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
Justice is to social justice like a chair to an electric chair.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will they understand as justice.
Tadeusz Borowski