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To not be, to not suffer
To not inflict pain.
Undo it all
One existence,
That neither tidings
Nor souvenir
Would stay after me.

— Czesław Miłosz

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Philosophy

More quotes by Czesław Miłosz

He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.

Daylight (1953)

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Uncollected Poems (1954)

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic.

The Captive Mind (1953)

What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Czesław Miłosz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.