#om

Even the worst book can give us something to think about. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#book #even #give #something #think

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#big #collectively #i #individual #like

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#best #common #imagination #over #primacy

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. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#creative #creative life #good #humanity #i

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#am #different #different points #distance #duality

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#comparison #dream #get #him #i

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. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#believe #general #i #mission #more

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. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#foreground #growing #i #into #life

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. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#anything #claim #fuss #i #know

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#element #every #just #preserved #reversed