Giorgos Seferis Quotes & Sayings

To say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again. — Giorgos Seferis

Leaves like rusty tin
for the desolate mind that has seen the end-
the barest glimmerings.
Leaves aswirl with gulls
made wild by winter. — Giorgos Seferis

And if the soul
Is to know itself
It is into a soul
That it must look:
The stranger and the enemy, we've seen him in the mirror. — Giorgos Seferis

Like a bird with broken wing
that has traveled through wind for years ...
I sleep and my heart stays awake ... — Giorgos Seferis

You spoke about things they couldn't see and so they laughed. Yet to row up the dark river against the current, to take the unknown road blindly, stubbornly, and to search for words rooted like the knotted olive tree- let them laugh. And to yearn for the other world to inhabit today's suffocating loneliness, this ravaged present- let them be. — Giorgos Seferis

Now that you will leave, now that the day of payment
dawns, now that no one knows
who he will kill and how he will die
take with you the boy who saw the light
under the leaves of that plane tree
and teach him how to study the trees. — Giorgos Seferis

And a soul
if it is to know itself
must look
into its own soul:
the stranger and enemy, we've seen him in the mirror. — Giorgos Seferis

Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends. — Giorgos Seferis

For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men. — Giorgos Seferis

I mean, in any case, that when you really feel something, you face the difficulty of expressing it. And that, after all, forms your style. — Giorgos Seferis

I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace.
Because we've loaded even our song with so much music that it's slowly sinking
and we've decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold
and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail. — Giorgos Seferis

I think the Swedish Academy wished to manifest its solidarity with the living spirit of Greece today. — Giorgos Seferis

I don't want to be anything today; tomorrow, we'll see. — Giorgos Seferis

Souls shriveled by public sins, each holding office like a bird in its cage — Giorgos Seferis

In every corner a gramophone shop
in every shop a hundred gramophones
in every gramophone a hundred records
in every record
an alive person playing with a dead one.
Take the steel needle and separate them
if you can. — Giorgos Seferis

They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn't know where to look. — Giorgos Seferis

I watched you with all the light and darkness I have
Giorgos Seferis — Giorgos Seferis

Every morning the warm water reminds me
that I have nothing else alive near me. — Giorgos Seferis

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first? — Giorgos Seferis

Our friends have left us
Perhaps we never saw them, perhaps
we encountered them when sleep
still brought us very close to the breathing wave
perhaps we search for them because we search for the other life,
beyond the statues. — Giorgos Seferis