Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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

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

Family, Friends And Family, Friends

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.' Joseph Brodsky

Life, Art, Laugh, Literature, Party, You

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

Life, Book, Win, Game, Small, Life Is A

Venice is eternity itself. Joseph Brodsky

Venice, Eternity, Itself

How delightful to find a friend in everyone. Joseph Brodsky

Friendship, Friend, Find, Everyone, How

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

Work, Nature, Time, Alone, Man, Myself

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

Education, Everything, Something, Well

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

Future, Justice, Better, Social Justice

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

Life, Time, Language, Boredom, You, Most

I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country. Joseph Brodsky

Honor, Country, Glory, Will, Bring, Poet

Top 10
Joseph Brodsky
Quotes

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

Past, Voice, Political, Criticism, Same

The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga. Joseph Brodsky

Nature, Good, Justice, Human Nature, Bad

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth. Joseph Brodsky

Attitude, Heart, Moment, Mind, Win

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

Good, Style, Speed, Always, Precision

Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language. Joseph Brodsky

Life, Moment, Language, Because, Hold

The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations. Joseph Brodsky

Love, Spiritual, Bridge, Sometimes, Only

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism. Joseph Brodsky

Criticism, Nothing, Last, Line, Poem

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words. Joseph Brodsky

Art, Words, Finding, Spirit, Seeking

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse. Joseph Brodsky

Life, Good, Battle, Bad, Way, Worse

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic. Joseph Brodsky

Poetry, Blue, Farmer, Dangerous, Crowd

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

Loss, Remember, Creation, Inevitable

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

History, Lie, Real, First, Consciousness

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding. Joseph Brodsky

Knowledge, Isolation, Reality, You, Idea

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

Man, Ethical, Need, Against, Order, Act

No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term. Joseph Brodsky

Perfect, Oppression, You, Fatigue, Which

I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic. Joseph Brodsky

Love, Enough, Fortunate, Things, Write

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