Great Throughts Treasury

"I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud’s life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity."

"I hope that you have nothing against malice, my good engineer. In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment."

"I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress."

"I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. Mankind as humanitarian internationalism; reason and virtue as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social desirability; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it."

"I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide."

"I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally."

"I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had."

"I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness."

"I tell them if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh."

"I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?"

"I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is only wickedness and dark voluptuousness and enmity against humankind, if it is given power over our thought and contemplation. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up."

"I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts! For therein, and in nothing else, lies goodness and love of humankind."

"I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being."

"If the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air."

"If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it."

"In all humanism there is an element of weakness, which in some circumstances may be its ruin, connected with its contempt of fanaticism, its patience, its love of scepticism; in short, its natural goodness."

"In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius."

"In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality."

"In effect it seemed to him that, though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope."

"In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the cultural proper."

"Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege."

"Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism."

"Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?"

"Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?"

"Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time-or returning thither after long absence-and stepping into a Venetian gondola?"

"It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death."

"It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless."

"It is a deep-lying patriarchal instinct in the dog which leads him-at least in the more manly, outdoor breeds-to recognize and honor in the man of the house and head of the family his absolute master and overlord, protector of the hearth; and to find in the relation of vassalage to him the basis and value of his own existence, whereas his attitude toward the rest of the family is much more independent."

"It is a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear."

"It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive."

"It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available."

"It is love, not reason that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization."

"It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. Strange hours! Strangely enervating labor! Bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!"

"It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men."

"It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life."

"It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind."

"It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration."

"It seemed that at the end of the lecture Dr. Krokowski was making propaganda for psycho-analysis; with open arms he summoned all and sundry to come unto him. Come unto me, he was saying, though not in those words, come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden. And he left no doubt of his conviction that all those present were weary and heavy-laden. He spoke of secret suffering, of shame and sorrow, of the redeeming power of the analytic. He advocated the bringing of light into the unconscious mind and explained how the abnormality was metamorphosed into the conscious emotion; he urged them to have confidence; he promised relief."

"It was, however, striking—in the best sense of the word—that precisely those rules that corresponded exactly to their overseers’ economic interests enjoyed unconditional veneration, whereas rules for which said correspondence was less applicable were more likely to be winked at."

"It's unprecedented, it's bitter, it's personal and it's partisan. Under ordinary circumstances and given the nature of expected relations between members of Congress, you just wouldn't have something like this."

"Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life."

"Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure, and brightened his dress with smart ties and handkerchiefs and other youthful touches."

"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."

"Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door."

"Love as a force contributory to disease."

"Love for him, for the human body, was extremely humanitarian an interest and had more educational power than the whole teaching skills of the world!"

"Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives kind thoughts."

"Luck of the writer, the idea of feeling is quite the feeling, the very thought can be too."

"Man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge."

"Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering it in a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable--it is sumpathy."