Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy. – Wislawa Szymborska
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again. – 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
Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings. – Wislawa Szymborska
All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look. – Wislawa Szymborska
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. – Wislawa Szymborska
Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through. – Wislawa Szymborska
Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light. – 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
Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me. – 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
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
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile. – Wislawa Szymborska
When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn’t work, but I’ve never pretended it didn’t happen to me. – 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
