Joseph Brodsky Quotes

If it was up to us every single day, then we would all have a perfect life, but stuff happens, but it's an imperfect world.

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.

I ask why your Omnipotent God does not hold a man back when he is about to commit a sin or offence. It is child’s play for God. Why did He not kill war lords? Why did He not remove the fury of war from their minds? In this way God could have saved humanity from great calamity and horror.

We sometimes feel the shadows have got hold of us, the shadows of evil. But still, it's up to us to fight.

I jerked my chin toward Frost’s body. ‘All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.’ Hao said, “Life is not safe. A man might spend his whole time on earth staying safe in a basement, and in the end, he still dies like everyone else.” Half-naked, covered with the same filth we all were, he still gave the impression of being in control of himself and his environment.

You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature - or at least what it has become.

We are all frail-embodied creatures, who at times suffer through injustice, abuse, illness, pain and misfortune.

The devil fools with the best laid plans.

He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself.

You never know when the devil might come calling.

The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life.

My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.

The assault of our enemies is not part of our life; it is only part of our experience; we throw it off and guard ourselves against it as against frost, storm, rain, hail, or any other of the external evils which may be expected to happen.

A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

The world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition.

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.