Quotes By Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Wislawa Szymborska
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.
Wislawa Szymborska
Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
Wislawa Szymborska
Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
Wislawa Szymborska
'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.
Wislawa Szymborska
Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
Wislawa Szymborska
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
Wislawa Szymborska
Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.
Wislawa Szymborska
Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
Wislawa Szymborska
Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.
Wislawa Szymborska
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.
Wislawa Szymborska
Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
Wislawa Szymborska