Explore Quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

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.

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

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

I'm drowning in papers.

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.

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, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

There is so much Everything _x000D_ that Nothing is hidden quite nicely

After every war someone has to tidy up.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

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 lifes wisdom.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.