Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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Joseph Brodsky

Profession : Poet

Birth : May 24, 1940

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

Joseph Brodsky

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Joseph Brodsky

Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

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

Joseph Brodsky

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

Joseph Brodsky

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.

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

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

Joseph Brodsky

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

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Joseph Brodsky

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

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