Tadeusz Borowski Quotes & Sayings

Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death. — Tadeusz Borowski

A man has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions. He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He utters the same ordinary words. — Tadeusz Borowski

What a curious power words have. — Tadeusz Borowski

It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. — Tadeusz Borowski

I risked my life to save lives. I'm not looking for glory. I just want people to know the truth about what happened. — Tadeusz Borowski

For quite some time now, like the foetus inside a womb, a terrible knowledge had been ripening within me and filling my soul with frightened foreboding: that the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed, like some ridiculous soap bubble. I become obsessed with a miser's piercing anxiety whenever I allow myself to think that the Universe may be slipping out into space, like water through cupped hands, and that, ultimately - perhaps even today, perhaps not till tomorrow or for several light years - it will dissolve for ever into emptiness, as though it were made not of solid matter but only of fleeting sound. — Tadeusz Borowski

Neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth
that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves
that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night
so the rope, paper, knife. — Tadeusz Borowski

Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat. — Tadeusz Borowski

And I think about my cell at the Pawiak prison. During the first week I felt I would not be able to endure a day without a book, without the circle of light under the parafin lamp in the evening, without a sheet of paper, without you ... — Tadeusz Borowski

The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work, but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man nor in the morality of systems. [p. 168] — Tadeusz Borowski

I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another - through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting. — Tadeusz Borowski

The world is ruled by power and power is obtained by money. — Tadeusz Borowski

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it. — Tadeusz Borowski

I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will they understand as justice. — Tadeusz Borowski