Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

I've been obsessed with doomsday for a long time - the idea that different cultures respond to it differently, and religions will change people's outlook on it.

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

Eschatological fears are an ancient human concern. The Romans expected the world to end in 634 B.C. owing to a prophecy involving twelve eagles, while the early Christians anticipated the Final Judgment in their own lifetimes. Pope Sylvester II thought A.D. 1000 would be the last year, a view updated for the modern age by the Millennium bug.

'Apocalyptic Love,' that is pretty from the hip in the sense that, one day, Slash and I were talking - I think it was Slash and I - about the end of the world and the Mayan calendar and all that crazy stuff.

There is no hope the future will but turn the old sand in the falling glass of time.

Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.

What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

First of all nothing will happen and a little later nothing will happen again.

It's as if we spend our entire lives avoiding Jell-O but it is always there at the end, waiting.

Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing, you work hard, then you die with nothing. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old. - Wayan

You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.” “I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

God knows what happens to your time once you have begun to get old. You are busy all the time, you do important things, you work, and yet when you sum it all up the result is nothing.

In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.

God is about to eliminate the white man from this earth.

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

Men plan. Fate Laughs. Guis Alera, First Lord

Will the wind ever remember the names it has blown in the past? And with its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom, it whispers no this will be the last.

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.

In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.

No one who is young is ever going to be old.

The Dark Lord has Nine. But we have One, mightier than they: the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads.

All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.

Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.