Top 100 Joseph Brodsky Quotes (2024 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. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

19. “I’m 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I’m nothing. By affiliation I’m nothing.”

— Joseph Brodsky

20. “Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating...”

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

22. “I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out.”

— Joseph Brodsky

23. “If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore...”

— Joseph Brodsky

24. “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

25. “There’s nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.”

— Joseph Brodsky

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

29. “For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.”

— Joseph Brodsky

30. “As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep sliding off.”

— Joseph Brodsky

31. “Still, winter is an abstract season: it is low on colors, even in Italy, and big on the imperatives of cold and brief daylight. These things train your eye on the outside with an intensity greater than that of the electric bulb availing you of your own features in the evening. If this season doesn’t necessarily quell your nerves, it still subordinates them to your instincts; beauty at low temperatures is beauty.”

— Joseph Brodsky

32. “An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.”

— Joseph Brodsky

33. “I’m a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.”

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

35. “Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.”

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.”

— Joseph Brodsky

41. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

43. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Joseph Brodsky

46. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

48. “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

49. “Who included me among the ranks of the human race?”

— Joseph Brodsky

50. “What paradise and vacation have in common is that you have to pay for both, and the coin is your previous life.”

— Joseph Brodsky