Quotes by Polish Authors - Page 9

The only common good is the common liberty to pursue individual goods.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
Jacob Bronowski
If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
Joseph Rotblat
It doesnot matter; there’s many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us ofa night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphereof its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to theastronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of itslight--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering.
Joseph Conrad
Entrepreneurship is the use of self-interest in the service of others. Politics is the use of others in the service of self-interest.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
For the moment, I am relying on the authority of Cahir aep Ceallach, the only soldier in our company-and Cahir confirmed that winning battles by means of a rapid escape from the battlefield is permissible from the point of view of most military doctrines.
Andrzej Sapkowski
We create eternity out of crumbs of time.
Anna Kamieńska
Suffering is the greatest treasure on earth; it purifies the soul. In suffering, we learn who our true friend is.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
Peace is a precious and a desirable thing. Our generation, bloodied in wars, certainly deserves peace. But peace, like almost all things of this world, has its price, a high but a measurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price. There is only one thing in the lives of men, nations and countries that is without price. That thing is honor.
Józef Beck
This, let me remind you again, is a love story; you can see it by the imbecility, not a repulsive imbecility, the exalted imbecility of these proceedings, this station in torchlight, as if they had come there on purpose to have it out for the edification of concealed murderers.
Joseph Conrad
What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.
Rosa Luxemburg
We need to get to the other side of the lake if you want to help the fairies,” said Mikolay.We could use my crystal ball for transportation,” suggested Julia pulling out a small crystal ball out of her pocket.
Magda M. Olchawska
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Joseph Conrad
No one wants to suffer. But that is the fate of each. And some suffer more. Not necessarily of their own volition. It's not about to enduring the suffering. It's about how you endure it.
Andrzej Sapkowski
On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.
Stanisław Lem
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices.
Joseph Conrad
Be a lover of the world, it is the only way to survive in it.
Janosch
The first time I watched him fight, I got hard. My heart pounded in my chest, and I chewed on my lip until it bled. I vowed then I would make him mine.
Kasia Bacon
A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.
Wisława Szymborska
It would be indeed unusual if it turned out that the set of orders that our mind is able to construct and accept, having as it does a deep sense of “understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly improbable. This way of thinking, so modest in its assessment of our abilities, is probably the only way recommended, given our lack of knowledge, because we are not aware of our limitations.
Stanisław Lem
...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
Joseph Conrad
The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
Jacob Bronowski
Tell me,' asked Stas, 'what is a wicked deed?' 'If anyone takes away Kali's cow,' he answered after a brief reflection, 'that then is a wicked deed.' 'Excellent!' exclaimed Stas, 'and what is a good one?' This time the answer came without any reflection: 'If Kali takes away the cow of somebody else, that is a good deed.' Stas was too young to perceive that similar views of evil and good deeds were enunciated in Europe not only by politicians but by whole nations.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Character has outlived its day. In ancient, primitive times, when biologically weak man struggled against omnipotent nature, character was useful, beneficial; with hideous labor it shoved the heavy stone of human impotence forward. We learned to praise ourselves, to admire character, to prostrate ourselves before it, make a fetish of it. But today no one has the courage to discredit character, although, psychologically speaking, it is now a throwback, simply reactionary.
Tadeusz Konwicki
What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.
Stanisław Lem
So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...
Stanisław Lem
If you want peace, prepare for ideological war with those who want others to prepare for physical war.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.
John Paul II
Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his "false self." This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.
Alice MIller
As a childI put my finger in the fireto becomea saint.As a teenagerevery day I would knock my head against the wall.As a young girlI went out through a window of a garretto the roofin order to jump.As a womanI had lice all over my body.They cracked when I was ironing my sweater.I waited sixty minutesto be executed.I was hungry for six years.Then I bore a child,they were carving mewithout putting me to sleep.Then a thunderbolt killed methree times and I had to rise from the dead three timeswithout anyone’s help.Now I am restingafter three resurrections.
Anna Swir
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
I am free, anonymous man. My flights and falls occurred while I was wearing a magical cap of of invisibility, my successes and sins sailed on in invisible corvettes, and films and books flew off into the abyss in invisible strongboxes. I am free, anonymous.
Tadeusz Konwicki
The move is there, but you must see it.
Savielly Tartakower
What is history? What is its significance for humanity? Dr. J. H. Robinson gives us a precise answer: "Man's abject dependence on the past gives rise to the continuity of history. Our convictions, opinions, prejudices, intellectual tastes; our knowledge, our methods of learning and of applying for information we owe, with slight exceptions, to the past-often to the remote past. History is an expansion of memory, and like memory it alone can explain the present and in this lies its most unmistakable value.
Alfred Korzybski
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Leo Rosten
Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.
John Paul II
I read part of it all the way through.
Sam Goldwyn
The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.
Joseph Conrad
Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fan­tasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home.
Alice MIller
Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore completely, that powerful massif of feather bedding rising out of the night.
Bruno Schulz
Hoffland, as it was called, was, next to Moda Polska (simply “Polish Fashion”) one of the rare examples of the quasi-private, though officially nationalized fashion companies in Poland. Both have survived communism, and Hoff kept designing well into the 90s. You could be sure, that if Hoff wrote about a new style for wearing a shawl in her column, the same afternoon there would already be dozens of girls on the streets trying to copy this style. Her flagship idea was blackening the “coffin shoes” (i.e. light, paper shoes, used as footwear for the deceased) which when colored black could pass as elegant “ballerinas”.
Agata Pyzik
I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....
Joseph Conrad
There is not eternal damnation, the only rewards and punishments are right here in this world.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Anaemia is an illness primarily affecting characters in novels.
Marchel Reich-Ranicki
In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.
Stanisław Lem
It seemed that out of every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and that every groan on the arena found an echo in thousands of breasts. Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one, -- happiness and love.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Nobody is sure of his life, property and health when the parliament deliberates.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause--a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art--for me, of fiction--is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.
Jerzy Kosiński
The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul.
Joseph Conrad
The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.
John Paul II
She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream...
Joseph Conrad
I plead with you--never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.
John Paul II
Prayer finds its source in God's holiness and it is at the same time our response to this holiness.
John Paul II
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.
Alice MIller
I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
Joseph Conrad
As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
Joseph Conrad
There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.
Jerzy Kosiński
Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?
Stanisław Lem
You don’t need to provide your parents with a “success story” to share at gatherings.
Lukasz Laniecki
We are staring at each other, forgetting about the harsh reality and I can feel my heart reacting. He touches my cheek and the familiar electric current runs through me. His hands are warm, caressing my pale skin. His deep-blue eyes are filled with serenity and passion. I keep telling myself to breathe, but I am unable to exhale the air from my lungs. Then he leans forward and his lips touch mine, increasing the temperature in my body. He kisses me gently, trying to break his way through, testing to see if I let him in. His lips are sweet and warm. A few seconds later it is all over and he disappears once again, leaving me uncontrollably awake and trying to gather my wild thoughts.
Joanna Mazurkiewicz