Joseph Brodsky Quotes:
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky
A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it – which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself – one has to try to love the object of one’s attention a little bit less.
Joseph Brodsky
A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We’re all given to fretting a lot.
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.
Joseph Brodsky
After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
Joseph Brodsky
An ethical man doesn’t need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
Joseph Brodsky
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky
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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
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
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
Joseph Brodsky
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
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky
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
For some odd reason, the expression ‘death of a poet’ always sounds somewhat more concrete than ‘life of a poet.’
Joseph Brodsky
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
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Joseph Brodsky
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
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.
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
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
I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Joseph Brodsky
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn’t take it that seriously.
Joseph Brodsky
I’m the happiest combination you can think of. I’m a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
Joseph Brodsky