Joseph Brodsky Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Joseph Brodsky:

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.

Joseph Brodsky

In terms of freedom, America doesn't invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.

Joseph Brodsky

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, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

Joseph Brodsky

For a head of state presiding over a ruined economy, an active army with its low wages is god-sent: All he's got to do is provide it with an objective.

Joseph Brodsky

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 for the language.

Joseph Brodsky

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.

Joseph Brodsky

I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.

Joseph Brodsky

I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.

Joseph Brodsky

Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

Joseph Brodsky

I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.

Joseph Brodsky

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

Joseph Brodsky

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

Joseph Brodsky

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

Joseph Brodsky

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

Joseph Brodsky

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

Joseph Brodsky

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

Joseph Brodsky

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

Joseph Brodsky

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Joseph Brodsky

In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.

Joseph Brodsky

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Joseph Brodsky

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

Joseph Brodsky

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.

Joseph Brodsky

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

Joseph Brodsky

Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.

Joseph Brodsky

Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.

Joseph Brodsky

No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.

Joseph Brodsky

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

Joseph Brodsky

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

Joseph Brodsky

Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.

Joseph Brodsky

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

Joseph Brodsky

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

Joseph Brodsky

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

Joseph Brodsky

Literature invents its own rules.

Joseph Brodsky

Venice is eternity itself.

Joseph Brodsky

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

Joseph Brodsky