{
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  "name": "Czesław Miłosz",
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      "title": "The Captive Mind",
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      "slug": "vulgarized-knowledge-characteristically",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/czeslaw-milosz/the-captive-mind/vulgarized-knowledge-characteristically",
      "text": "Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.",
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      "slug": "how-can-i-live",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/czeslaw-milosz/rescue/how-can-i-live",
      "text": "How can I live in this country\n\nWhere the foot knocks against\n\nThe unburied bones of kin?\n\nI hear voices, see smiles. I cannot\n\nWrite anything; five hands\n\nSeize my pen and order me to write\n\nThe story of their lives and deaths.\n\nWas I born to become\n\na ritual mourner?\n\nI want to sing of festivities,\n\nThe greenwood into which Shakespeare\n\nOften took me. Leave\n\nTo poets a moment of happiness,\n\nOtherwise your world will perish.",
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      "slug": "love-means-to-look",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/czeslaw-milosz/rescue/love-means-to-look",
      "text": "Love means to look at yourself\n\nThe way one looks at distant things\n\nFor you are only one thing among many.\n\nAnd whoever sees that way heals his heart,\n\nWithout knowing it, from various ills —\n\nA bird and a tree say to him: Friend.",
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      "slug": "from-life-from",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/czeslaw-milosz/rescue/from-life-from",
      "text": "From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife,\n\nwhat grain will be saved?My son, believe me, nothing remains,\n\nOnly adult toil,\n\nthe furrow of fate in the palm.\n\nOnly toil,\n\nNothing more.",
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      "slug": "they-used-to-pour",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/czeslaw-milosz/rescue/they-used-to-pour",
      "text": "They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds\n\nTo feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.\n\nI put this book here for you, who once lived\n\nSo that you should visit us no more.",
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      "text": "Someone will read as moral\n\nThat the people of Rome or Warsaw\n\nHaggle, laugh, make love\n\nAs they pass by martyrs' pyres.\n\nSomeone else will read\n\nOf the passing of things human,\n\nOf the oblivion\n\nBorn before the flames have died. But that day I thought only\n\nOf the loneliness of the dying,\n\nOf how, when Giordano\n\nClimbed to his burning\n\nThere were no words\n\nIn any human tongue\n\nTo be left for mankind,\n\nMankind who live on.",
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      "added_at": "2026-09-26T07:01:55"
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