Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

It is like living in a wilderness of mirrors. No fact goes unchallenged.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.

If you keep saying two plus two equals five over and over again, then that is what people are going to think. Maybe it does equal five if we keep changing the definition of what's normal and what's right and what's wrong.

Seeing is not always believing.

The problem with our role is Americans live in a world of illusion.

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

We live in a world of denial, and we don't know what the truth is anymore.

I enter the world called real as one enters a mist.

Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

Every generation lives with illusions.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

I often tend to think that things are not what they seem.

Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.