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I swear, there is in me no wizardry of word.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

— Czesław Miłosz

Przysięgam, nie ma we mnie czarodziejstwa słów.
Mówię do ciebie milcząc, jak obłok czy drzewo.

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Notes from Wikiquote

"Dedication" (1945); quoted in Conversant Essays : Contemporary Poets on Poetry (1990) edited by James McCorkle, p. 69

Topics

Silence

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.

All Czesław Miłosz quotes →

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To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox New Thought Pastels (1913)

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

George Eliot

There are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence.

Benedict of Nursia

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

Federico Fellini I'm a Born Liar (2003)

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.