Giorgos Seferis Quotations

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

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.

Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

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

They are children of many men, our words

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

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.

A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested.

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

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

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.