Joseph Brodsky Quotes (36 Quotes)



    In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a ''read,'' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.





    I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.



    For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

    Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.


    It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

    Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.



    Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

    What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

    A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre the realization of it, for destiny.

    Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

    A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

    If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.


    For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.


    The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even, if you will, eccentricity. That is, something that cant be feigned, faked, imitated something even a seasoned impostor couldnt be happy with.

    Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

    This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.


    It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

    For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

    The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

    After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

    The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

    Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

    Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

    What should I say about life That it's long and abhors transparence.


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    Robert Frost - e. e. cummings - Sylvia Plath - Sophocles - Rumi - Ovid - Omar Khayyam - Ogden Nash - Jorge Luis Borges - Allan Cunningham


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