Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

The people of our city are holding on by a thread. Time has run out. Can we survive another night? And who can we depend on? Only God knows.

Man is a victim of dope in the incurable form of hope.

If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life than a non-believer.

God, I am afraid he won't give me his answer today. If only somebody would help me - it is all so terribly depressing.

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

And as far as false hope, there is no such thing. There is only hope or the absence of hope-nothing else.

To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.

I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.

I often find myself on my knees praying to something or someone to not be in control.

I got to that desperate place where nobody could help me but God.

When all else fails there's always delusion.

The swimmer adrift on the open seas measures his strength, and strives with all his muscles to keep himself afloat. But what is he to do when there is no land on the horizon, and none beyond it?

If all you were left believing was what you were seeing, it'd be nothing but desperate. To have hope, you're going to have to imagine that there's something behind the curtain.

The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that what he has not yet looked in the right place.

All hope of remedy is considered vain

I struggle every day to hold on to what little hope I can find.

I guess a little bit of delusion can go a long way.

It takes certain kind of naiveté, or perhaps just stupidity, to know things will end and still hope otherwise.

I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.

I wonder how you're supposed to know the exact moment when there's no more hope.

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

I'm trying to let him know what I'm about to do. I'm hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can't.