Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanislaw Lec

Aphorisms like this one don’t comfort; they tighten the screws. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, the Polish poet and master of the barbed one-liner, writes as someone who watched language become evidence, weapon, and alibi. “Value your words” sounds like etiquette until the second sentence flips it into mortal accounting: “Each one may be the last.” The line works because it fuses two kinds of finality at once. There’s the banal, physical kind (death can interrupt mid-sentence), but also the political kind Lec knew intimately: one wrong phrase can end a career, a freedom, a life. Under authoritarian pressure, “last” doesn’t require a coffin; it can arrive as censorship, interrogation, exile, disappearance.

The intent isn’t piety about careful speech. It’s a warning about the price of language and the illusion that words are cheap. In Lec’s world, the word is a unit of risk. Value means weigh: not only for elegance or truth, but for consequences. The subtext is grimly ironic: we like to imagine speech as self-expression, a natural right, a safe discharge of opinion. Lec reminds you that speech is also a record, a signature, a trail.

Coming from a poet, the line carries an extra sting. Poetry is supposed to be the place where words are chosen for beauty. Lec insists they should also be chosen as if they are scarce. Not because silence is virtuous, but because words, once released, can’t be unspoken - and sometimes aren’t forgiven.