Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

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.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

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.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

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.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

~ Wislawa Szymborska

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. 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

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