Wladyslaw Quotes & Sayings

Street traders were doing good business selling a paper toy which represented a pig, but if you put the paper together and unfolded it in a certain way it turned into Hitler's face. — Wladyslaw Szpilman

I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

We, the Poles, do not understand war as a symbol but as a real fight. — Wladyslaw Sikorski

Being twenty years old, I naturally had a wild imagination and a tender heart. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

During my childhood, I had a long, dangerous spell of illness, and my health has always been delicate. — Wladyslaw Reymont

That evening it was announced that curfew would be postponed until midnight, so that the families of those 'sent for labour' would have time to bring them blankets, a change of underwear and food for the journey. This 'magnanimity' on the part of the Germans was truly touching, and the Jewish police made much of it in an effort to win our confidence. Not until much later did I learn that the thousand men rounded up in the ghetto had been taken straight to the camp at Treblinka, so that the Germans could test the efficiency of the newly built gas chambers and crematorium furnaces. — Wladyslaw Szpilman

By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them. — Wladyslaw Reymont

Everything must go its own way. One has to plow in order to sow, one has to sow in order to harvest, and what is disturbing has to be weeded out, like a bad weed. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

There is no happiness without patriotism. — Wladyslaw Sikorski

It is only our exactions of life that are terrible. It is only our impossible conceptions of beauty and good and justice that are terrible
because they never are realized, and at the same time they prevent us taking life as it is. That is the real source of all our sorrow and suffering. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

I realize that the strivings of the Polish people gave rise, and still do so, to the feelings of understanding and solidarity all over the world. — Lech Walesa

He imagined her upstairs in her room, lying in bed with her hair spread across the pillow, that nightgown with the pearl buttons down the front tangled around her legs, nothing beneath the delicate fabric but her softness and warmth. Desire pulsed through his body, hungry and hot and needy.
It was unbearable to want her with such intensity, unthinkable to need her with such desperate longing, dangerous to believe that she could somehow keep the demons away. He did not want to need her, for in need, there was dependence. He could not trust, for in trust, there was betrayal. Better never to see heaven at all than to catch a glimpse of it, grab for it, and lose it.
He went to his room. He slept with his demons, and he woke alone. — Laura Lee Guhrke

A free peasant means free Poland, for he is the foundation of her greatness and independence. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

My father was the church organist; the village curate was my mother's brother, a former monk from the order of Pijar, a very well-educated and ascetic man who loved nothing but solitude. — Wladyslaw Reymont

Right time, right place, right moment. — Truth Devour

As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact. — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

Poland didn't experience a groundbreaking moment in 1989. We didn't storm the secret police building. The squads of secret police, with all their political baggage, remained unscathed. — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

Brief flings and the companionship of a professional are no match for the love and trust between a husband and wife. — Barbara Longley

And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live. — Wladyslaw Szpilman

Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love. — Wladyslaw Szpilman

The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming. — William Hazlitt

Today it is time for strong and courageous people because only they can achieve victory and rid the world of tyranny. — Wladyslaw Sikorski

Many people expect, just as they did then, "those at the top" to make all their decisions for them: Please get us work, and take care of our rent. These people vote for those who shout the loudest and deliver promises that are ultimately impossible to fulfill. — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

Manipulation is moving together for my advantage. Motivation is moving together for mutual advantage. — John C. Maxwell

Every lord's mansion stands on the foundation of your bones, soldier, every field has been saturated with your sweat, and you, peasant, even if you worked your arms down to the stub, if you won a hundred battles, and faithfully gave the last drop of your blood for your country, you would always be a slave. There is no land for you, no heaven, no shelter, not even a doghouse where you could rest your poor head. You are the last before God and before people, the last one. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

I have made it a habit not to speculate over the psychological state of our elected leaders. — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

The workers went along with the Nazis, the Church stood by and watched, the middle classes were too cowardly to do anything, and so were the leading intellectuals. We allowed the unions to be abolished, the various religious denominations to be suppressed, there was no freedom of speech in the press or on the radio. Finally we let ourselves be driven into war. We were content for Germany to do without democratic representation and put up with pseudo-representation by people with no real say in anything. Ideals can't be betrayed with impunity, and now we must all take the consequences. — Wladyslaw Szpilman

When I was six and already able to read and write Polish, my uncle the curate taught me Latin. Since he had no suitable textbook, he simply used the breviary. — Wladyslaw Reymont

It's a disgrace to us all! he almost screamed. 'We're letting them take us to our death like sheep to the slaughter!.....at least we could break out of the ghetto, or at least die honourably, not as a stain on the face of history! — Wladyslaw Szpilman

One experienced minute sometimes teaches us more than a lifetime. — Wladyslaw Sikorski

What is worse than a quitter? Someone who is afraid to begin. — Bill Davis

I don't feel sorry for myself, Beck. Lots of people have shitty parents and roaches in the cabinets and stale, raw Pop-Tarts for dinner and a TV that barely works and a dad who doesn't care when his son doesn't come home during a national disaster. The thing is, I'm lucky. I had the bookstore. — Caroline Kepnes

An irresistible fascination with terrifying death killed me ahead of time. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

Our duty is to rise in the bright daylight, openly, beating the drums. The cause for which we are ready to give our necks does not fear the light, and to attack the enemy by guile would not suit it. A Pole has always despised ambushes, and God forbid that he should change. We shall not fail to have enough strength to defeat our enemies if we do not fail to have the spirit of sacrifice and love. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before. — W. H. Auden

Unfortunately the niveau of political culture is not particularly high in Poland - a relic of the communist past. — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

We make some changes. But mostly changes make us. — Mason Cooley