Top 100 Joseph Brodsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

— Joseph Brodsky

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “For darkness restores what light cannot repair.”

— Joseph Brodsky

3. “Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.”

— Joseph Brodsky

4. “Geography blended with time equals destiny.”

— Joseph Brodsky

5. “What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.”

— Joseph Brodsky

6. “The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.”

— Joseph Brodsky

7. “Poetry is what is gained in translation.”

— Joseph Brodsky

8. “No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there – well or poorly.”

— Joseph Brodsky

9. “On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.”

— Joseph Brodsky

10. “The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity.”

— Joseph Brodsky

11. “When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, ‘German literature is where I am.’ It’s really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.”

— Joseph Brodsky

12. “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.”

— Joseph Brodsky

13. “What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”

— Joseph Brodsky

14. “Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty’s existence is that we never know when we are to die.”

— Joseph Brodsky

15. “Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.”

— Joseph Brodsky

16. “The government, the state, they’re just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can’t possibly take them seriously.”

— Joseph Brodsky

17. “Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.”

— Joseph Brodsky

18. “Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo.”

— Joseph Brodsky

19. “Believe your pain.’ This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won’t finally unclasp.”

— Joseph Brodsky

20. “Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.”

— Joseph Brodsky

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

21. “Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man’s recognition of hisown negative potential – with his sense of what he is capable of.”

— Joseph Brodsky

22. “Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”

— Joseph Brodsky

23. “What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.”

— Joseph Brodsky

24. “In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.”

— Joseph Brodsky

25. “In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species’ development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.”

— Joseph Brodsky

26. “A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.”

— Joseph Brodsky

27. “In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.”

— Joseph Brodsky

28. “After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.”

— Joseph Brodsky

29. “The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.”

— Joseph Brodsky

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

30. “In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.”

— Joseph Brodsky

31. “Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.”

— Joseph Brodsky

32. “Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.”

— Joseph Brodsky

33. “Perhaps art is simply an organism’s reaction against its retentive limitations.”

— Joseph Brodsky

34. “The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another.”

— Joseph Brodsky

35. “The Constitution doesn’t mention rain.”

— Joseph Brodsky

36. “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.”

— Joseph Brodsky

37. “The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.”

— Joseph Brodsky

38. “A rhyme turns an idea into a law; and, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex.”

— Joseph Brodsky

39. “A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.”

— Joseph Brodsky

40. “Poems, novels – these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They’ve been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don’t think their owners should be grateful to receive them.”

— Joseph Brodsky

41. “I’m neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don’t think I am.”

— Joseph Brodsky

42. “The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.”

— Joseph Brodsky

43. “In the end, there’s always this city. As long as it exists, I don’t believe that I, or for that matter, anyone, can be mesmerized or blinded by romantic tragedy.”

— Joseph Brodsky

Featured in: Romance Quotes

44. “Plain and simply, a love lyric is one’s soul set in motion. If it’s good, it may do the same to you.”

— Joseph Brodsky

45. “In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.”

— Joseph Brodsky

46. “The meaning of these lines is anything but passive for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one.”

— Joseph Brodsky

47. “After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed’s dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.”

— Joseph Brodsky

48. “As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.”

— Joseph Brodsky

49. “I don’t want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.”

— Joseph Brodsky

50. “Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.”

— Joseph Brodsky