Great Throughts Treasury

"It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go."

"It is completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor has she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anybody more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."

"It is impossible to check which decision is the right one because there are no comparisons. You experience everything directly, for the first time and without preparation. As an actor who comes on stage, without having ever previously rehearsed. But what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself already? For this reason, the life increasingly resembles a sketch. Also, sketch is not the right word, because always is a design sketch into something that the preparation of an image while the sketch of our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture. Once is not enough, says Tomas. If we can only live once anyway, so it's as live not one."

"It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground, he said, than to send petitions to a president."

"It is much more important to dig a crow buried alive than sending a petition to the President."

"It is obvious that one of us has the right to be afraid even of the low risk prospect, and with all that, the sudden decision may seem strange to me. Do not you think with me they conceal something more mysterious, something that goes beyond the field of logical thinking?"

"It is precisely to miss the certainty of truth and the unanimous consent of the other man becomes individual."

"It is not possible to never pinpoint to what extent are our relationships with others are the result of our feelings, our love or do not love, or our dislike our paper, and to what extent are our pre-conditional examination of power among individuals"

"It is not the faith of what I'm talking about. They are images, ideas. Not sure why you would get rid of them. I would be orphaned without them."

"It is true that termites of reduction has always attack the human life. Greatest love ends up being reduced to a skeleton stunted memories"

"It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty."

"It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sense of shame. People are slaves to rules."

"It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier, seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense."

"It isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence."

"It terrified her that she was living out her life in the small town where time was void of events, and although she was still young she was constantly preoccupied with the thought that her life would be over before she had had a chance to start living."

"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, conviction, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even direct contact with, that boarder, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter."

"It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world."

"It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting. He saw his girl seducing a strange man, and had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him). He had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness. This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her. It had always seemed to him that her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point."

"It was born out of the six accidents and sciatica chief doctor."

"It was drizzling. As people rushed along, they began opening umbrellas over their heads, and all at once the streets were crowded too. Arched umbrella roofs collided with one another. The men were courteous, and when passing Tereza they held their umbrellas high over their heads and gave her room to go by. But the women would not yield; each looked straight ahead, waiting for the other women to acknowledge her inferiority and step aside. The meeting of the umbrellas was a test of strength. At first Tereza gave way, but when she realized her courtesy was not being reciprocated, she started clutching her umbrella like the other women and ramming it forcefully against the oncoming umbrellas. No one ever said Sorry. For the most part no one said anything, though once or twice she did hear a Fat cow! or Fuck you! The women thus armed with umbrellas were both young and old, but the younger among them proved the more steeled warriors."

"It was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple."

"It was really willing to take a holiday. But a holiday full of necessities and Tsriha all."

"It was in itself says that all things and all people know about themselves disguised."

"It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made."

"It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate."

"It was time laid bare, time in and of itself, time at its most basic and primal, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living pure time?pure, vacant time) so as not to forget it for a moment, keep it constantly before me, and feel its weight."

"It would be so easy to find peace in a world of illusions. But I always tried to live in both worlds at the same time and not leave one for the other. I cannot leave the real world, although it lose everything. The end may be enough if I did one thing. The last thing: Let him surrender my life as clearly and understandably epistle to the only person who will understand and bear further."

"It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down."

"It would be so easy to find calm in the world of imagination. But I've always tried to live in both worlds at the same time and not leave one of them because of the other."

"Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it; they turned their heads away from fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people make a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds."

"It?s entirely to herself, her whole existence to give him wanted to, but I give everything to how hard you try, if so shallow, superficial love or flirting require things that the young man forbid, the feeling he so much? the seriousness weight combined with failing condemned."

"It's hard to live with people who are willing to send you to exile or death, it's hard to make them good friends, and it's hard to love them!"

"Jealousy fills thoughts more fully than most passionate intellectual work. The mind does not remain any free moment. Jealous man does not know what boredom? Jealousy is a terrible toothache. Do not allow a man to do, even to sit, forcing him to walk to and fro, to and fro."

"It?s a vicious circle; people are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But because they?re going deaf it has to be played louder still."

"I've rooted disbelief, to the extent that it leads to a man who, while including likes or does not like, I did not bring all of this seriously or did not, more accurately, I think it only just a testament to the image that he wants to give them all the same!"

"Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth."

"Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it."

"Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness."

"Jean-Marc got up to fetch a bottle of brandy and two glasses. And then a mouthful: - At the end of my visit to the hospital, he started telling memories. Reminded me what I would have said when I was sixteen. At that moment I realized the only meaning of friendship as it is practiced today. Friendship is essential to man for the proper functioning of your memory. Remember the past, bring it with you always, it is perhaps necessary to preserve the condition, as they say, the integrity of the self. Stop I do not shrink, so keep your volume, you need to water the flowers as memories of a vessel, and that irrigation requires regular contact with witnesses of the past, ie with friends. They are our mirror, our memory, not walking requires them only to occasionally pull the luster to this mirror so we can target it. But I do not give a damn about what I did in high school! What I always wanted since early youth, perhaps since childhood, was something completely different: a friendship as a value above all others. He liked to say, between truth and friend, always choose the friend. Was said by the teaser, but I thought it seriously. Today I know that this maxim was archaic. Could be valid for Achilles friend Patroclus to the Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, until Sancho, that despite disagreements was a true friend of your love. But no longer is for us. I'll so my pessimism today I prefer the truth to friendship."

"Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry."

"Julie is getting sadder. And for men, there is no better balm for the pain of grief caused by a woman."

"Just because people want to be masters of the past to change the future."

"Justice, in fact, and we should not be too interested. Justice is not a human thing. There is justice blind and rigid laws, and unless it perhaps a higher justice, but here I do not understand. Always seemed to me that in this world live outside of Justice. Justice concerns me. Justice is something beyond me and above me. Whatever it takes, something inhuman. I will never work with this disgusting force."

"Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you."

"Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that."

"Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

"Kafka and Hasek put us at odds with this huge paradox: during the era of modern times, the Cartesian reason eroded, one after another, all values ??inherited from the Middle Ages. But when the total victory of reason, is the pure irrational (just wanting to force his will) that will come upon the scene of the world, because there will be no commonly accepted system of values ??that you can do this obstacle."

"Kafka transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job? into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen."