Quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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.

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

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

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.

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

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

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.

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.

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.