Joseph Brodsky Quotes

We live ruins amid ruins.

Well, there is something beautiful about ruins. I mean, in one sense it's not that different from going to Rome and looking at the Forum. But it's changing. It truly is. I'm optimistic but skeptical.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Antiquity! I like its ruins better than its reconstructions.

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

Of dead kingdoms I recall the soul, sitting amid their ruins

And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.

What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

When I was really young, I wanted to be a history teacher because I was obsessed with the past.

My films have a lot of historical context; I'm a huge fan of ruins. You see a lot of ruin work in my movies, I like ruins.

The weak grey light that serves as harbinger of red and golden dawn faintly lit my window. I fumbled for a candle, found and lit it, and by its little light saw that the rose floating in the bowl was dying. It had already lost most of its petals, which floated on the water like tiny, un-seaworthy boats, deserted for safer craft. "Dear God," I said. "I must go back at once.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

I'm passionate about history and there's no more historic place than London. We're sitting on a thousand years of history and you can smell it as you're walking around the streets.

Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

Inside of us, there's a continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

There's a fascination frantic in a ruin that's romantic.

We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them.

The past is a bucket of ashes

Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire.

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it.