Quotes by Polish Authors - Page 15

There must be repressed truth even in lies.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.
Isaac Deutscher
Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.
Frédéric Chopin
Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.
Tadeusz Konwicki
It’s entirely on our children to build their best futures. Not on us, parents. And we should be imprinting this message on our children’s brains from as early as possible.
Lukasz Laniecki
Never test another man by your own weakness.
Joseph Conrad
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
Joseph Conrad
Your mind is your greatest power. Use it well.
Aneta Cruz
There, about a dozen times during the day, the wind drives over the sky the swollen clouds, which water the earth copiously, after which the sun shines brightly, as if freshly bathed, and floods with a golden luster the rocks, the river, the trees, and the entire jungle.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frédéric Chopin
A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
John Paul II
Mikolay took his wand out, touched the cage’s lock and said: “Eis Izras” three times. The door opened at once, unfortunately making lots of noise and waking the humans up. Mikolay knew a few powerful hexes and he was able to create small flying dragons. He hoped that he could stop the people, animals, and block the shadows to buy some time.
Magda M. Olchawska
Those who devote themselves to the study of Sacred Scripture should always remember that the various hermeneutical approaches have their own philosophical underpinnings, which need to be carefully evaluated before they are applied to the sacred texts.
John Paul II
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
Jacob Bronowski
It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.
Mark Kac
There are no ugly women, only lazy ones
Helena Rubinstein
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.
Joseph Conrad
To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
They (parents) use this guilt-tripping to stop you from fulfilling your plans, but most important, from believing something they don’t (something which contradicts their beliefs)
Lukasz Laniecki
They're both convincedthat a sudden passion joined them.Such certainty is beautiful,but uncertainty is more beautiful still.Since they'd never met before, they're surethat there'd been nothing between them.But what's the word from the streets, staircases, hallways--perhaps they've passed by each other a million times?I want to ask themif they don't remember--a moment face to facein some revolving door?perhaps a "sorry" muttered in a crowd?a curt "wrong number" caught in the receiver?but I know the answer.No, they don't remember.They'd be amazed to hearthat Chance has been toying with themnow for years.Not quite ready yetto become their Destiny,it pushed them close, drove them apart,it barred their path,stifling a laugh,and then leaped aside.There were signs and signals,even if they couldn't read them yet.Perhaps three years agoor just last Tuesdaya certain leaf flutteredfrom one shoulder to another?Something was dropped and then picked up.Who knows, maybe the ball that vanishedinto childhood's thicket?There were doorknobs and doorbellswhere one touch had covered another beforehand.Suitcases checked and standing side by side.One night, perhaps, the same dream,grown hazy by morning.Every beginningis only a sequel, after all,and the book of eventsis always open halfway through.
Wisława Szymborska
An approach, according to which children should fulfil their parents’ dreams/ do everything in order to make their parents happy/ provide their parents with a peace of mind, or whatever they want for themselves - because they owe it to them for all those years in which their parents took care of them - is utterly selfish.
Lukasz Laniecki
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Sholem Asch
The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.
Ryszard Kapuściński
I lived willy-nilly. Without any sense of being part of the order of things. I lived by fragments, pieces, scraps, in the moment, at random, from incident to incident, as if buffeted by ebb and flow. Oftentimes I had the impression that someone had torn the majority of pages out of the book of my life, because they were empty, or because they belonged not to me but to someone else’s life.
Wiesław Myśliwski
The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Don't trust the heart, it wants your blood.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
This is natural: one must read Herodotus's book-and every great book-repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.
Ryszard Kapuściński
Whenever socialism appears it destroys at least one thing: diversity. Everything has to be "the best", but in reality as we know best things are scarse.. Let me remind you again, that for the Reds, "best" things are these things that they consider "the best" for us, not these that we like!!
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.
Joseph Conrad
Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of our truth about the unique history of our childhood.
Alice MIller
Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.
Czesław Miłosz
The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.The self-critical jackal does not exist.The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it.The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.
Wisława Szymborska
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Stanisław Lem
The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not hte general, it can't - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
Czesław Miłosz
Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.
Alice MIller
Anarcho-capitalism: the realization that the only way to effectively govern the market is to have an effective market in governance.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
...he began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears into the sea.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Truly, great is pride and blindness, so that the blood dripping from the scaffold would be called justice. - Epigraph to the 5'th chapter
Sapkowski
Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . . . Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.
Stanisław Lem
If you have more dreams than achievements-you're young.
Shimon Peres
Indeed neither life nor science bothers about "essences"-they leave "essences" to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.
Alfred Korzybski
The time to build your future is in your teenage years and your 20s, but equally, in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.
Lukasz Laniecki
How many extraordinary phenomena like this, so foreign to human comprehension, might lie concealed in space? Do we need to travel everywhere bringing destructive power on our ships, so as to smash anything that runs counter to our understanding?
Stanisław Lem
He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.
Czesław Miłosz
A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.
Artur Rubinstein
The time to right the wrong ticks with precission.
Aneta Cruz
I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.
Joseph Conrad
Progress is a wonderful thing of course, and I can appreciate the lactiferins that are sprinkled on the pasture to turn the grass to cheese. And yet this lack of cows, however rational it may be, gives one the feeling that the fields and meadows, deprived of their phlegmatic, bemusedly ruminating presence, are pitifully empty.
Stanisław Lem
Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Love consists of a commitment which limits one's freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one's freedom on behalf of another.
John Paul II
Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable.
Alfred Korzybski
They are not demons, not devils...Worse than that.They are people.
Andrzej Sapkowski
Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries.
Wisława Szymborska
Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.
Norman Davies
Time is change transformation evolution.
Isaac L. Peretz