Wislawa Szymborska's Quotes

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

I don't believe I have a mission. Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.