Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky’s line swings like a quiet blade at the pieties of organized belief: infinity, he suggests, is too big to be franchised. The key provocation is “sponsored,” a word that drags the sacred into the marketplace, as if creeds are corporate backers underwriting a particular version of the endless. It’s not only a critique of religion’s institutional claims; it’s a critique of how institutions, by design, simplify. Creed needs borders, terms, an authorized story. Infinity is the opposite: it refuses containment, it makes fools of systems.

Calling it a “poetic notion” isn’t a retreat into softness. Brodsky is elevating poetry as a rival epistemology, one that approaches the infinite through ambiguity, rhythm, and contradiction rather than doctrine. Poetry doesn’t promise a map; it offers a sensation of scale. That’s why it can feel “far greater”: it doesn’t close the loop. It lets the mind hover at the edge of what language can’t fully hold.

Context matters. Brodsky, shaped by Soviet repression and exile, knew what it means for an official creed to colonize inner life. Read this against any regime or church that claims jurisdiction over ultimate meaning. His subtext is libertarian in the deepest sense: protect the imagination from authorized infinities. The infinite, for Brodsky, isn’t a theological product. It’s an encounter - private, destabilizing, and therefore politically suspicious.