top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Polish Authors
"An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded."
"This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius."
"Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena."
"Films made in the spirit of the past continued to be made."
"No! on Human Rights and Freedom, on a subject that is as self-evident as that two and two make four, there is no need of any written authority."
"However, that old mode of Polish filmmaking virtually disappeared."
"Cities are the greatest creations of humanity."
"In the forty years of the people's republic, some of the worst historical traits were preserved in our people. These included even the common characteristics developed in the economic reality of the time of partitions in the 17th and 18th centuries."
"This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization."
"The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn."
"When a man comes to me and tries to convince me that he is not a thief, then I take care of my coppers."
"A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway."
"I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory."
"In Europe, there is no television filmmaking legislation that could assist film production because private broadcasters are not interested in supporting Polish film."
"Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ's vineyard."
"Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams..."
"Let the veil of silence fall presently over what happened afterwards. Silence, too, can speak out."
"Not a few other very eminent and scholarly men made the same request, urging that I should no longer through fear refuse to give out my work for the common benefit of students of Mathematics."
"It is a temptation for me to wear all my rings at once."
"There werethings, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only hehad lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The lighthad destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distantshadows."
"Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce."
"Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light."
"The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author."
"When man meets an obstacle he can't destroy, he destroys himself."
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."
"I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones."
"And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole."
"I made the right decisions, I set everything on the right course, the reforms are going in the right direction."
"Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life."
"This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak-the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning."
"Conditions were so hard. To send the news out, telex was the only means, but telex was very rare in Africa. So if somebody was flying to Europe, we gave him correspondence to send after he arrived."
"I realize that the strivings of the Polish people gave rise, and still do so, to the feelings of understanding and solidarity all over the world."
"Hard work keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and spirit."
"Therefore, having obtained the opportunity from these sources, I too began to consider the mobility of the earth."
"His words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness."
"Men are just as vain as women, and sometimes even more so."
bottom of page