Joseph Brodsky's Quotes

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

Man is what he reads.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.