Polish writers’ words and thoughts in English

‘Our duty is to rise in the bright daylight, openly, beating the drums. The cause for which we are ready to give our necks does not fear the light, and to attack the enemy by guile would not suit it. A Pole has always despised ambushes, and God forbid that he should change. We shall not fail to have enough strength to defeat our enemies if we do not fail to have the spirit of sacrifice and love.’

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

 

‘Generally speaking, all the people of the so-called upper classes do not live a true, real life. Below us something always happens, there is the struggle for life, for bread, a life full of diligent work, animal necessities, appetites, passions, everyday efforts,--a palpable life, which roars, leaps, and tumbles like ocean waves, and we are sitting eternally on terraces, discussing art, literature, love, women; strangers to that other life far removed from it, obliterating, out of the seven, the six work-days. Without being conscious of it, our inclinations, nerves, and soul are fit only for holidays. Immersed into blissful dilettantism as in a warm bath, we are half awake, half dreaming. Consuming leisurely our wealth, and our inherited supply of nerves and muscles, we gradually lose our foothold upon the soil.’

Henryk Sienkiewicz

 

‘Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless, and errant?’

Bruno Schultz

 

‘Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.’

Joseph Conrad

 

‘I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.’

Witold Gombrowicz

 

‘Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.’

Stanislaw Lem

 

‘Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.’

Wislawa Szymborska

 

‘Create your own myths; that is how the gods got started.’

‘If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he entitled to happiness?’

‘Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of people.’

‘No snowflake in the avalanche ever feels responsible.’

‘Do not expect too much on the end of the world.’

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec