Joseph Brodsky

Best Quotes

• 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.

• Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?

• The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

• How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

• It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

• 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 imposter couldn't be happy with.

• No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.

• Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

• I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change-within himself, not on the outside.

• For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe-not empirically, alas, but only theoretically-that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

Joseph Brodsky Quotes- See more quotes