Wislawa Szymborska
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
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
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
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
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
Wislawa Szymborska

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

After every war someone has to tidy up.

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
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
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
Wislawa Szymborska

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
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska

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

Wislawa Szymborska
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
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.