Zbigniew Herbert Quotes

Kicking leaves you momentarily on one foot, and for that moment you are in a very weak position. If you were to be swept off your feet, you would be finished. This is why lifting your feet off the ground is crazy.

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once.

I'm a people person. I never get tired of watching people, especially young people.

We may stand, if only on one leg, or at least be left still upon our knees.

Paul Newman would have been a much more important star if he hadn't always tried to be an anti-hero, to show the human feet of clay.

Find a man with both feet firmly on the ground and you've found a man about to make a difficult putt.

We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects...and the assorted human beings who perpetuate and maintain this perversity.

The key to life is balance, especially if you are on a ledge.

To me, when you have people trying to put their best foot forward but facing conflict, that's when stories are the most interesting.

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

We can't love a place or a person if we always have one foot out the door.

The real primary diseases of man are such defects as pride, cruelty, hate, self- love, ignorance, instability and greed; and each of these, if considered, will be found to be adverse to Unity.

I have no answers, but every day I wish I could have the same point of view for any 24-hour period. I wish I was in some system where I don't constantly question myself.

the more I know about people, the better I like my dogs.

When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

To amend mankind, moralists should show them man, not as he is, but as he ought to be.

Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lender's books, and defy the foul fiend.

I am so tired - so tired of being of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually.

When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence.