Great Throughts Treasury

"Kitsch is essentially the negation of absolute shit, so how in the proper sense of the word and the figurative, kitsch excludes everything from its visual field's essential unacceptable in human existence."

"Kitsch is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German is entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."

"Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."

"Large countries' patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in constant danger. Their patriotism was an enormous compassion for their country."

"Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists."

"Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria."

"Laughter, on the other hand, Petrarch went on, is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter."

"Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs."

"Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries."

"Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not make her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance."

"Lightly tapped with the heart of his tongue was Jaromil wrote in one of his poem. It seemed that her language pinky on her hand, her breast, her navel are separate, autonomous beings who speak unheard each other, it seemed that the girl's body consists of thousands of beings to love this body means to listen to these things and to hear how the two breasts whispering language secretive."

"Like all of us, Klima also considered true only what comes into our lives from within, gradually, organically, while what comes from outside, unexpectedly and coincidentally, I looked like an invasion of the unreal. Unfortunately there is nothing more real than this unreality."

"Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray."

"Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself."

"Light and dark?those are the two poles of human character. Dark hair signifies virility, courage, directness, and initiative, whereas fair hair symbolizes femininity, tenderness, and passivity. A blonde is really a woman twice over. That?s why a princess has to be fair-haired. And that?s why women?to be as feminine as possible?color their hair blond but never black."

"Live in the truth, not lie or to oneself or to others, this is only possible if you live without an audience. Therefore that there is a witness to our actions, we adapt eyes watching us, and nothing that we do is true. Have an audience, think public is living a lie."

"Living in Paradise is not resembled running in a straight line, exhaust us into the unknown, it was not an adventure. Moves in a circle of familiar things. Its uniformity was not boredom, and happiness."

"Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death."

"Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying."

"Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one?s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain."

"Living your misery, you can be happy or unhappy. It is this choice that is your freedom. You are free to merge your individuality in the pot of the multitude with a sense of defeat, or with euphoria... Our only freedom is to choose between bitterness and pleasure. The insignificance of all is our lot, do not wear it as a defect, but knowing rejoice."

"Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."

"Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty."

"Love is a battle, said Marie-Claude, still smiling. And I plan to go on fighting. To the end. Love is a battle? said Franz. Well, I don't feel at all like fighting. And he left."

"Love can arise from a single metaphor."

"Love is a continual interrogation. I don?t know of a better definition of love."

"Love begins with a metaphor, which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."

"Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."

"Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard."

"Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves."

"Love is like a dance. Humans always lead to another cell."

"Love is manifested not by the desire to make love (this applies to a crowd), but by the desire for shared sleep (this desire relates to one)."

"Love is not manifested in the desire to sleep with someone (this desire occurs in connection with an innumerable number of women) but in the desire to sleep with someone (this desire occurs in connection with a single woman)."

"Love is our freedom."

"Love means giving up power."

"Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."

"Love to measure, test, we turned to love to try and save all of these questions as well as a love of all things perhaps shortening the works. Perhaps dislike is why we love very much to seek, is, against our people any requests, without it being with her ??something else wishing ourselves to give her place anything from it (love) to demand our right."

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."

"Love is poetry, poetry is love"

"Love is the definition of a gift is unconditional, to be loved without the requirement is a proof of true love. If a woman told me: I love you because you are intelligent, because you decent, because you bought me gifts, because you do not pursue women, because you wash the dishes... then I'll be disappointed, This is how love - in fact - is a project of self-interest. How much is it more accurate to hear: I'm crazy about you, even if were not intelligent or fit, even if you're a liar or arrogant or just a bastard!"

"Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me but a woman."

"Love relationships are like empires, what that disappears is built on the principle that can even disappear with him too."

"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."

"Man can never know what to want because it has only one life and it cannot compare to previous lives nor corrected in subsequent lives... There is no way to check what is the right decision because there is no comparison. Everything is immediately experienced for the first time and without preparation. As if a player entered the scene without ever repeated. But can be worth living if the first rehearsal of life is life itself already? This is what makes life still looks like a sketch. But even sketch is not the right word, because a sketch is always the draft of something, the preparation of a table, while the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline table-less."

"Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?"

"Man has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and other's."

"Man never know what to want, because living only one life and have no way to compare it with their previous lives or amend their later lives."

"Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death."

"Man's world is the planet of inexperience."

"Man passes through the present with his eyes blindfolded. He is permitted merely to sense and guess at what he is actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it has had."