Please enable Javascript
This site requires Javascript be enabled to provide you the best experience. Some features may not be available with Javascript disabled!

Venice is eternity itself.

Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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

Loading...

Venice is eternity itself. Joseph Brodsky

Venice, Eternity, Itself

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, Small

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

Family, Friends, Connections

Man is what he reads. - Joseph Brodsky

Man is what he reads. Joseph Brodsky

Education, Man, He

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it. Joseph Brodsky

Job, Step, Language

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

Oppression, Perfect, You

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness. Joseph Brodsky

Beauty, King, Size

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

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience. Joseph Brodsky

History, Responsibility

How delightful to find a friend in everyone. Joseph Brodsky

Friendship, Friend, Find

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous. Joseph Brodsky

Heart, Know, Dumb

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

History, Lie, Real

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors. Joseph Brodsky

Language, Birds, Data

Who included me among the ranks of the human race? Joseph Brodsky

Funny, Me, Human

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Joseph Brodsky

Goal, Artist, Creative

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

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

I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved. Joseph Brodsky

Life, Age, Book

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

Man, Reality, Person

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, Political, Voice

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

Life, Evil, Reality

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed. Joseph Brodsky

Poetry, Quality, Quantity

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

Time, Water, Building

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal. Joseph Brodsky

Poetry, Goal, Speech

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned. Joseph Brodsky

Beginning, Know, Thought

One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Joseph Brodsky

Language, Poem, Line

Cite this Page: Citation

Find on Amazon: Joseph Brodsky

Related Authors

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Edgar Allan Poe

Emily Dickinson

BrainyQuote

BrainyQuote Desktop

BrainyQuote Mobile

Site

Quote Of The Day

Social

BQ on Pinterest

BQ on Instagram

Apps

iPhone/iPad app

Quote Of The Day Feeds

Javascript and RSS feeds

WordPress plugin

Quote of the Day Email

About

Copyright © 2001 - 2017 BrainyQuote

Language: Español | Français

Loading...

Load more quotes