Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky; 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 May 1940
CountryUnited States of America
fall reading writing
If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.
battle way good-and-bad
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
dirty book winning
Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
art animal goal
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon.
dark would-be figures
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.
home matter doe
No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.
destiny land geography
Geography blended with time equals destiny.
eye body attention
The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
miserable i-can ifs
If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
light darkness criminal-mind
For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
education reading book
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
friendship friends delightful
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
happiness thinking evil
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.