Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

Joseph Brodsky Quotes

American - Poet May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Joseph Brodsky

Your, Saint Patrick's Day

Venice is eternity itself. Joseph Brodsky

Eternity, Venice, Itself

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

Still, Very, I Remember

It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment. Joseph Brodsky

Compact, Shed, Whatnot

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

Game, Small, Play

An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible. Joseph Brodsky

Need, Against, Ethical

The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic. Joseph Brodsky

Political, Voice, Own

Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it. Joseph Brodsky

City, Conquered, Caged

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

Big, Always, Ideological

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

Boredom, Teach, Utter

Top 10
Joseph Brodsky
Quotes

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

Capable, However, Enterprise

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction. Joseph Brodsky

Intensity, Always, Prose

Man is what he reads. - Joseph Brodsky

Man is what he reads. Joseph Brodsky

Education, Man, Reads

The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about. Joseph Brodsky

More, Bring, About

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable. Joseph Brodsky

Loss, Remember, Some

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

Notion, Which, Poetic

To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc. Joseph Brodsky

Better Future, Ease, Worn

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

Only, Form, Snobbery

By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful. Joseph Brodsky

Here, Large, Though

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. Joseph Brodsky

Ashamed, Some, Tries

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

Generation, Cry, Uprising

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

Own, Reader, Imposed

A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less. Joseph Brodsky

Love, Feels, Explain

It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher. Joseph Brodsky

Rule, Almost, Simpler

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

Comprehend, Which, Amount

It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality. Joseph Brodsky

Against, Use, Rhymes

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