Top 100 Joseph Brodsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

54. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

57. “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

58. “This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.”

— Joseph Brodsky

59. “It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours.” –.”

— Joseph Brodsky

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn’t be retained by the mind.”

— Joseph Brodsky

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Joseph Brodsky

67. “How delightful to find a friend in everyone.”

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

69. “A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.”

— Joseph Brodsky

70. “The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can’t win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.”

— Joseph Brodsky

71. “Scratch on, my pen: let’s mark the white the way it marks us.”

— Joseph Brodsky

72. “My poems getting published in Russia doesn’t make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I’m not trying to be coy, but it doesn’t tickle my ego.”

— Joseph Brodsky

73. “I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.”

— Joseph Brodsky

74. “I don’t believe in that country any longer. I’m not interested. I’m writing in the language, and I like the language.”

— Joseph Brodsky

75. “Every life has a file, if you will.”

— Joseph Brodsky

76. “I don’t have principles. I have nerves.”

— Joseph Brodsky

77. “More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.”

— Joseph Brodsky

78. “I’m not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.”

— Joseph Brodsky

79. “What’s happening in Russia is devoid of autobiographical interest for me. Maybe it’s egocentric. Whatever it is, feel free to use it.”

— Joseph Brodsky

80. “Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?”

— Joseph Brodsky

81. “The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.”

— Joseph Brodsky

82. “I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.”

— Joseph Brodsky

83. “What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.”

— Joseph Brodsky

84. “In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.”

— Joseph Brodsky

85. “It is a virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal out of one’s emotional life. There’s always enough work to do, not to mention that there’s world enough outside.”

— Joseph Brodsky

86. “If I can get somewhere, I’m all right. If not, I’m miserable.”

— Joseph Brodsky

87. “All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.”

— Joseph Brodsky

88. “Love as content is in the habit of limiting formal patterns. The same goes for faith. After all, there are only so many adequate manifestations for truly strong sentiments; which, in the end, is what explains rituals.”

— Joseph Brodsky

89. “The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin – not even by a minority.”

— Joseph Brodsky

90. “When I’m not writing or reading, I’m thinking about both.”

— Joseph Brodsky

91. “In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.”

— Joseph Brodsky

92. “I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.”

— Joseph Brodsky

93. “What’s wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the speed with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right.”

— Joseph Brodsky

94. “A word’s fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its usage.”

— Joseph Brodsky

95. “Mandelstam was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths.”

— Joseph Brodsky

96. “Nothing reveals a poet’s weakness like classical verse, and that’s why it’s so universally dodged.”

— Joseph Brodsky

97. “I didn’t want to be either the cre’me de la cre’me or a martyr. I’d rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn’t understand the language I write in.”

— Joseph Brodsky

98. “As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives .”

— Joseph Brodsky

99. “If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.”

— Joseph Brodsky

100. “If Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.”

— Joseph Brodsky