Joseph Brodsky Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches
Joseph Brodsky Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 6
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 7
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
Man is what he reads.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Joseph Brodsky | Refcard PDF ↑
