# Adam Mickiewicz's most famous lines (with the work they come from)

"Lithuania, my homeland!", "Measure your strength by your aims" and "Feeling and faith speak more strongly to me than the wise man's lens and eye": the most quoted passages of Poland's national poet Adam Mickiewicz, from Pan Tadeusz, Forefathers' Eve, Ballads and Romances and Ode to Youth, each with its source.

- 19 votes · 17 items
- Jun 8, 2024 · tripnerd.lazy
- https://even.best/en/l/5112/adam-mickiewicz-s-most-famous-lines-with-the-work-they-come-from

## Top 17

1. **Measure your strength by your aims, not your aims by your strength!** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Song of the Philarets.
2. **Youth, give me wings! Let me soar above the dead world into the paradise of illusion.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Ode to Youth (1820).
3. **Born of a foreign mother, his blood that of ancient heroes, and his name is forty-four.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Forefathers' Eve, part III.
4. **And I was there among the guests, I drank mead and wine, and what I saw and heard I set down in books.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Pan Tadeusz (1834), closing lines.
5. **Lithuania, my homeland! You are like health; only he who has lost you knows how much you should be prized.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Pan Tadeusz (1834), Invocation, lines 1–3.
6. **Dark everywhere, silent everywhere, what will be, what will be?** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Forefathers' Eve, part II.
7. **I count my life in evenings.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Konrad Wallenrod (1828).
8. **Hey, let's enjoy life! After all, we only live once.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Song of the Philarets.
9. **My name is Million, because I love and suffer torment for millions.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Forefathers' Eve, part III.
10. **God speaks more loudly in silence than in conversation, and whoever grows quiet in his heart will hear him at once.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Sayings and Remarks (from Boehme, Angelus Silesius and Saint-Martin).
11. **Oh, my love, I was lost in heaven the first time I kissed you!** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Forefathers' Eve, part IV.
12. **God alone can destroy the world and build another, but he cannot save us without our help.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Sayings and Remarks (from Boehme, Angelus Silesius and Saint-Martin).
13. **For a country to live, its laws must live.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Quoted in Czapliński and Bolek, Adwokaci w walce o sprawiedliwość (2004), p. 7.
14. **When I don't see you, I don't sigh or weep; I don't lose my senses when I see you.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Uncertainty (1825).
15. **Feeling and faith speak more strongly to me than the wise man's lens and eye.** (-1 · ▲0 ▼1) — Romanticism, Ballads and Romances (1822).
16. **In every place and at every hour where I wept with you, where I played with you, everywhere and always I will be with you.** (-1 · ▲0 ▼1) — To M\*\*\* ("Out of my sight!...").
17. **Wisdom you must draw out of yourself by your own work.** (-1 · ▲0 ▼1) — Quoted in Nic, co ludzkie… (1982), p. 70.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.