quote · Legacy record
Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.
Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.
Approximate author period: c. 1957 AD · modern
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- Author or tradition
- Czesław Miłosz
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1957 AD · modern
Approximate period for the recorded attribution to Czesław Miłosz, based on documented lifetime 1911 to 2004. Source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q45970 (checked 2026-10-08). This is not a quotation composition date or independent authentication of its attribution. Source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q45970 (accessed 2026-10-08).
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 138666; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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