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
book philosophical reading
As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.
reading perspective people
Literature sort of makes your daily operation, your daily conduct, the management of your affairs in the society a bit more complex. And it puts what you do in perspective, and people don't like to see themselves or their activities in perspective. They don't feel quite comfortable with that. Nobody wants to acknowledge the insignificance of his life, and that is very often the net result of reading a poem.
reading writing thinking
When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
reading grief believe
Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
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.
education reading book
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
american-poet bad good life
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
american-poet
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
memory substitute
If there is any substitute for love, it is memory
against anyone art aspects branch clear indeed irony itself language linguistic people poet poetry poets regards sensation simply species supreme talking works
In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a ''read,'' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.
change believe men
I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
god ideas spirit
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
eye body failing
When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.
imaginary-friend imaginary
All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.