Author of quotes: Joseph Brodsky

Do not be upset, because when you lie down and shut up, you will remind yourself of time.

Neurosis and depression will enter your lexicon; pills, in the medicine Cabinet.

One who writes a poem writes it above all because verse - extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, a man no longer able to refuse to repeat the experience, he falls into dependency on this process, as fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol. People in similar language, I believe, and called a poet.

Cursed gift of understanding, and consequently of forgiveness.

If this time of year and not always calms the nerves, it still subjects them to the instinct: beauty at low temperatures - a real beauty.

All of them are. Yes, all words, poems,
You walk among us as strangers
But at the same time close friends:
Impossible to love and to die is impossible,
But something will remain of us,
Although b loved b the last time
And, may be ordinary sadness
And maybe some names of feelings.

Every observation suffers from the personal qualities of the observer.

The will is good in man is visible from afar.

Inhumanity is always easier to organize than anything else. For these cases Russia does not need to import technologies.

If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is particular human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal form of private enterprise, it wittingly or unwittingly encourages in a person is his feeling of individuality, uniqueness, individually - transforming it from a social animal into a personality. Lot can be divided: bread, bed, belief, beloved - but not a poem, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular and the poem in particular are turning to man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct, without intermediaries, relationships. That's what I dislike art in General, literature especially, and poetry in particular, adherents of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. Because there's art, where read the poem, they discover on the site of the expected agreement and consensus - indifference and discordant, on a place of determination to action is the lack of attention and disgust.
In other words, in the toe, which the zealots of the common good and masters of the masses tend to operate, art writes "the dot-dot-comma-minus", transforming each toe in if not always attractive, but the human face.

The best way to defend against insults is not to be like the abuser.

People are born for each other. So vrazumili, or be patient.

The country in debt to drive - a much more reliable form of occupation than to enter the army.

I don't want to dwell on the subject, do not want to darken this evening with thoughts of the tens of millions of lives, ruined millions of well - because what happened in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century occurred prior to the introduction of automatic weapons - in the name of political doctrine, the failure of which already lies in the fact that it requires human sacrifice for its realization. I can only say that not from experience, alas, but only theoretically, I believe that for a person, having read Dickens, to shoot his own kind in the name of any of the ideas more difficult than for a person who has never read Dickens. And I'm talking about reading Dickens, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, etc., i.e. literature, not literacy, not about education. Competent-the educated man could, or that political treatise reading, to kill their own kind and even experience the delight of persuasion. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, Hitler also; Mao Zedong, so he even wrote poems; the list of their victims, however, far exceeds the list read.