99+ Wislawa Szymborska Quotes On Education, Friendship And Death Without Exaggeration

Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, and translator who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Her poetry is known for its ironic and philosophical tone, often exploring the nature of life and death. Szymborska is considered one of the most important and influential Polish poets of the 20th century. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Wislawa Szymborska on love, education, life.

Top 10 Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

1. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
5. I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
6. Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
7. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
8. In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
9. I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
10. Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?

Wislawa Szymborska Short Quotes

• I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
• Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
• All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
• After every war someone has to tidy up.
• I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
• It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
• I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
• Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
• Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
• Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.

Wislawa Szymborska Quotes About Love

They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience. — Wislawa Szymborska

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work! — Wislawa Szymborska

No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring. — Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska Quotes About Life

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

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand. — 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

Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska Quotes About World

Somewhere out there the world must have an end. — Wislawa Szymborska

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality. — Wislawa Szymborska

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. — Wislawa Szymborska

I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs. — Wislawa Szymborska

What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own? — Wislawa Szymborska

I don't believe I have a mission. Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal. — Wislawa Szymborska

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me. — Wislawa Szymborska

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal. — 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

We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself. — Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska Quotes About Work

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

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

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

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. — Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska Quotes About People

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it. — 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

Today when two people decide upon a thoughtless and precipitate abbreviation of the physical space between them, they think, at least at that moment, that they're mutually attracted and drawn together by an overwhelming force. — Wislawa Szymborska

Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two. — Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska Quotes About Poets

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric. — 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

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words. — Wislawa Szymborska

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on. — Wislawa Szymborska

When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences. — Wislawa Szymborska

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind. — Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans. — Wislawa Szymborska

Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out. — Wislawa Szymborska

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark. — Wislawa Szymborska

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything. — Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan — Wislawa Szymborska

Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground. — Wislawa Szymborska

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still — Wislawa Szymborska

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely — Wislawa Szymborska

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light. — Wislawa Szymborska

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice. — 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

And whatever I do will become forever what I've done. — Wislawa Szymborska

I'm drowning in papers. — Wislawa Szymborska

It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse. — Wislawa Szymborska

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself. — Wislawa Szymborska

I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else. — Wislawa Szymborska

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand. — Wislawa Szymborska

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses. — Wislawa Szymborska

No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants. — Wislawa Szymborska

Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink! — Wislawa Szymborska

History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line. — 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

There's simply too much fuss about myself. — Wislawa Szymborska

You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore. — Wislawa Szymborska

I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible. — Wislawa Szymborska

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects. — Wislawa Szymborska

But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet. — Wislawa Szymborska

Memory at last has what I sought. — Wislawa Szymborska

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men. — 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

Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke. — Wislawa Szymborska

Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared. — Wislawa Szymborska

Dying - you can't do that to a cat. — Wislawa Szymborska

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. — Wislawa Szymborska

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway. — 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

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones. — Wislawa Szymborska

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light. — Wislawa Szymborska

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die. — Wislawa Szymborska

Life Lessons by Wislawa Szymborska

1. Wislawa Szymborska's work emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the small details of life, as they often contain the most profound beauty and truth.
2. Her poetry also encourages readers to reflect on the complexity of the human experience, and to recognize the power of language to express that complexity.
3. Finally, her work serves as a reminder to appreciate the beauty of the world and to live life with an open heart.