Joseph Brodsky Quotes | Quotes by Joseph Brodsky

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
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What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
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Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
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No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.
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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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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.
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The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even-if you will-eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.
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An unemployed existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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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.
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
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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.
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For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe-not empirically, alas, but only theoretically-that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
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The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
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A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.
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Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
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Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, caf?s full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.
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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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