Quotes by Polish Authors - Page 11

I am telling himwhat he wants to hear: antsdying of love underthe constellation of the dandelion.I swear that a white rose,sprinkled with wine, sings.I am laughing, tiltingmy head carefullyas if checking an invention.I am dancing, dancingin astonished skin, inan embrace that creates me.
Wisława Szymborska
Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.
Stanisław Lem
to treat a human being as an animal - as a mere space-binder - because humans have certain animal propensities, is an error of the same type and grossness as to treat a cube as a surface because it has surface properties.
Alfred Korzybski
The true Christian can nurture a trustful optimism, because he is certain of not walking alone. In sending us Jesus, the eternal Son made man, God has drawn near to each of us. In Christ he has become our travelling companion.
John Paul II
Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.
Samuel Goldwyn
Parents were good to us, gave us a lot, took care for us when we couldn’t have taken care for ourselves, wanted the best for us, continue to care about us and our future, but none of it is good enough a reason to fulfil their dreams/ do everything in order to make them happy/ provide them with a peace of mind, or whatever they want for themselves.
Lukasz Laniecki
Of course there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings
Arthur Rubinstein
Many trees were pulled out of the ground with their roots crying for water.” The lake was all polluted with thick layers of grease,the grass & flowers were squashed, animals walked around. #kidsbooks "Mikolay & Julia"Total elocological destruction,said Mikolay trying to use one of the funny long words Julia was always using.These are not monsters Farina.These are people and building machines.
Magda M. Olchawska
When it comes, you’ll be dreamingthat you don’t need to breathe;that breathless silence isthe music of the darkand it’s part of the rhythmto vanish like a spark.
Wisława Szymborska
Then comes the insight that All is God. One still realizes that the world is as it was but it does not matter it does not affect one's faith.
Abraham Heschel
The world can't die. Many generations have thought the world was dying. But it was only their world which was dying.
Tadeusz Konwicki
An anarchist is someone who rejects the curious notion that crimes become virtues as they grow in size.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
Joseph Conrad
I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company.
Anzia Yezierska
Prawda jest córą czasu poczętą w przypadkowym i krótkotrwałym romansie ze zbiegiem okoliczności.
Andrzej Sapkowski
To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.
Ryszard Kapuściński
There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
You don't die in the United States you underachieve.
Jerzy Kosiński
The world will know peace when the entrepreneur fully masters the art of starving the politician.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.
Joseph Conrad
The surest way to damage society is to call for a "great man" to lead it. The surest way to improve society is to become a great man to lead oneself and convince others to do likewise.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Mundus vult decipi'—the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask?
Abraham Joshua Heschel
If anarchy is chaos, and chaos is war, why wasn't a single war started by anarchists?
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To reform the world - means to reform upbringing...
Janusz Korczak
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanisław Lem
In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
...no thought, if it be non-mathematical in spirit, can be trusted, and, although mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, the spirit of mathematics is always right and always sound.
Alfred Korzybski
There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.
Menachem Mendel
Believing that there is a conflict between rationality and spirituality is like believing that there is a conflict between knowledge and inspiration.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
You thought?" The landsknecht glanced at him piteously. "With what, I wonder? If you swallowed a cockroach with your soap, dolt, you'd have more intelligence in your guts than in your head.
Sapkowski
It's an invention, a fairy tale devoid of any sense, like all the legends in which good spirits and fortune tellers fulfill wishes. Stories like that are made up by poor simpletons, who can't even dream of fulfilling their wishes and desires themselves. I'm pleased you're not one of them, Geralt of Rivia. It makes you closer in spirit to me. If I want something, I don't dream of it—I act. And I always get what I want.
Andrzej Sapkowski
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously, and to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be. 'The unknown person' inside of them is our hope for the future.
Janusz Korczak
When I was a boy I felt that the roll of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the un-obvious- because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel associations, and almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomes, paradoxically, a sort of automatic mechanism of originality.
Stanislaw Ulam
The most important thing in life is to dare. The most complicated thing in life is to be afraid. The smartest thing in the world is to try to be a moral person.
Shimon Peres
Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
Abraham J. Heschel
All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
Joseph Conrad
He was alone in his wonderment,amoung creatures incapable of wonder--for them it was enough to exist and go their way.
John Paul II
Failure to find the truth is perhaps an intellectual defeat, but failure to look for the truth is an intellectual surrender.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?
Joseph Conrad
To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
Witold Gombrowicz
The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.
John Paul II
Treaties are like marriage: they aren't entered in to with the thought of betrayal, and once they're concluded one shouldn't be suspicious. And if that doesn't suit somebody, they shouldn't get married. Because you can't become a cuckold without being a husband, but you'll admit that fear of wearing the horns is a pitiful and quite ridiculous justification for enforced celibacy.
Andrzej Sapkowski
a stone / which in its own archaic, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts.
Wisława Szymborska
Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
Sholem Asch
If parents want “success stories” to share at gatherings they should provide themselves with those, and they should not use their children for that purpose.
Lukasz Laniecki
I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.
Witold Gombrowicz
Until Einstein (roughly), THE universe of Newton was, for us, THE universe. With Einstein, it became A universe. Something similar happen to man. A new 'man' was produced, just as good, certainly contraditory to the old one. THE man became A man, otherwise a 'conceptual construction', one among the infinity of possible ones.
Alfred Korzybski
Justice is to social justice like a chair to an electric chair.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
The human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name
John Paul II
The cashier had long since left for home. By now she was probably bustling by an unmade bed that was waiting in her small room like a boat to carry her off to the black lagoons of sleep, into the complicated world of dreams. The person sitting in the box office was only a wraith, an illusory phantom looking with tired, heavily made-up eyes at the empyiness of light, fluttering her lashes thoughtlessly to disperse the golden dust of drowsiness scattered by the elctric bulbs.
Bruno Schulz
You've a right to believe that we're governed by Nature and the hidden Force within her. You can think that the gods, including my Melitele, are merely a personification of this power invented for simpletons so they can understand it better, accept its existence. According to you, that power is blind. But for me, Geralt, faith allows you to expect what my goddess personifies from nature: order, law, goodness. And hope.
Andrzej Sapkowski
When I pronounce the word Future,the first syllable already belongs to the past.When I pronounce the word Silence,I destroy it.
Wisława Szymborska
When you're traveling you need to take care of yourself to get by, you have to keep an eye on yourself and your place in the world. It means concentrating on yourself, thinking about yourself and looking after yourself. So when you travel all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you're at home you simply are, you don't have to struggle with anything or achieve anything. You don't have to worry about the railways connections, and timetables, you don't need to experience any thrills or disappointments. You can put yourself to one side - and that's when you see the most.
Olga Tokarczuk
Words are beads on the strings of sentences. So make a beautiful necklace!
Aneta Cruz
The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.
Emanuel Ax
Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.
John Paul II
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.
Joseph Conrad
The sword of destiny has two edges. You are one of them.
Andrzej Sapkowski
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Joseph Conrad