Joseph Brodsky Quotes

61 quotes in 852 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
• Man is what he reads.
• 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,…
• For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your…
• How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.
• The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
• Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that…
• Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your…

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