Life & Wisdom Quote by Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz rigs the sentence like a moral provocation: choose the messy, loud human engine over the tidy counsel of “reason.” Coming from a poet who lived through occupation, totalitarianism, exile, and the long hangover of ideology in Eastern Europe, that preference isn’t romantic teenage fever. It’s a survival ethic. In the 20th century, “reason” too often arrived wearing a uniform, offering plans, quotas, and historical “necessity” as alibis for cruelty. Against that, passion becomes less a loss of control than a refusal to be anesthetized.

The phrasing does double work. “Better” is not “truer.” Milosz isn’t arguing that passion produces accurate conclusions; he’s saying it produces movement. Reason explains, categorizes, justifies; passion commits. That’s the subtextual jab at the cultivated skeptic, the bureaucrat, the intellectual who prides himself on balance while the world tips into disaster. The passionless person is safe, clean-handed, and therefore politically convenient: they can watch atrocity as if it were weather.

“Cannot change history” lands like an indictment of spectatorship. History, in Milosz’s register, isn’t a neutral timeline; it’s a battlefield of will. The line also carries a warning: passion is indispensable, but it’s not automatically virtuous. The same force that fuels resistance can be hijacked by fanaticism. Milosz, ever wary of slogans, seems to be arguing for a specific kind of passion: one tethered to conscience, alive to suffering, unwilling to let rationalizations become a substitute for action.