Joseph Brodsky quotes

Joseph Brodsky was a Russian-American poet and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work explores themes of exile, identity, and the human condition. He left a profound mark on world literature and was named U.S. Poet Laureate. Here are 40 of his quotes:

Man is what he reads. (Joseph Brodsky)
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
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. View quote
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. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick. (Joseph Brodsky)
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. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
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. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
For darkness restores what light cannot repair. There we are married, blest, we make once more the two-backed beast and children are the fair excuse of what we're naked for. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
How delightful to find a friend in everyone. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
This is just one example of the trimming of the self that - along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so - bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed's. (Joseph Brodsky)
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim... No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody: history, the state, superiors, race, parents, the phase of the moon, childhood, toilet training, etc. The menu is vast and tedious, and this vastness and tedium alone should be offensive enough to set one's intelligence against choosing from it. The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything... // "Speech at the stadium, 18 December 1988" View quote
Joseph Brodsky
What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness. View quote
Joseph Brodsky
If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. View quote
Joseph Brodsky