Zbigniew Herbert Quotes

if we lose the ruins nothing will be left

I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness

Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.

Even if we love someone very much, at times it happens that we forget about it.

cemeteries grow larger the number of defenders shrinks
but the defense continues and will last to the end
and even if the City falls and one of us survives
he will carry the City inside him on the roads of exile
he will be the City

we look at the face of hunger the face of fire the face of death
and the worst of them all - the face of treason

and only our dreams have not been humiliated

The carpet is too soft. Also the palm tree in the lobby is unbelievable. For a long time the Maitre looks at our faces, shuffling passports in his hands. "Such dark-ringed eyes, such dark-ringed eyes. I knew a merchant from Smyrna, who also had a false front tooth. Nowadays one has to be terribly careful: informers and scorpions are everywhere."

In the elevator we stand facing the mirror, but already at the first jerk we see silvery mildew in the place of our faces.

Study the world's skin before you set out to look for its heart.

he wanted to understand to the very end

- Pascal's night
- the nature of a diamond
- the melancholy of the prophets
- Achille's wrath
- the madness of those who kill
- the dreams of Mary Stuart
- Neanderthal fear
- the despair of the last Aztecs
- Nietzsche's long death throes
- the joy of the painter of Lascaux
- the rise and fall of an oak
- the rise and fall of Rome

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

Forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

The dead have need of fairy tales too.

I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience.

We fall asleep on words / we wake among words

go upright among those who are down on their knees
those with their backs turned those toppled in the dust

you have survived not so that you might live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when reason fails you be courageous
in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts

and your helpless Anger - may it be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

And if the City falls and one survives
he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile
he shall be the City

And if the City falls but a single man escapes. He will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile. He will be the City.

A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

So is blurred
so is blurred
in me
what white-haired gentleman
separated once and for all
and said
this is the subject
this is the object

we fall asleep
with one hand under our head
and with the other in a mound of planets

our feet abandon us
and taste the earth
with their tiny roots
which next morning
we tear out painfully