Great Throughts Treasury

"Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort."

"Only luck can strike us a message. What happens of necessity, what is expected and is repeated daily is just dumb thing."

"Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return."

"Only the most naive of questions are truly serious."

"Only chance can be interpreted as a message. What becomes necessary, which is expected to be repeated each day is dumb. Voice calls only chance for us. We try to count as Gypsies relay figures in the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup."

"Only in the differential millionth sexuality appears as something extraordinary, because it is not publicly available and needs to conquer. No more than half a century conquest was necessary to devote such a long time (weeks or even months!), So that the time dedicated to the conquest was the extent of the value of what was taken. And even today, though the time of conquest has been greatly reduced, sexuality remains the safe in which the secret is hidden by women."

"Optimism is the opium of the people! Healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky!"

"Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. Co-incidence means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time."

"Optimism is the opium of the people."

"Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs."

"Our century refuses to acknowledge anyone?s right to disagree with the world?All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister."

"Our family name, too, is dividing us by chance, without knowing when appeared in the world, and how a plucked grandparents anonymous. We nose that name at all, we do not know anything about history, however sincerely bear glorified, unite it and amuse us very proud as ridiculous as if we, who are under the influence of inspiration Aptdanah genius."

"Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass."

"Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines."

"Over the years, it will start to see the similarities in all these people to an alignment (people to kiss every single one stops at the same place, all going to the same, praising the woman uses the same metaphor) and removes the monotony of events (events that are only eternal recurrence of the same event), but as a teenager she collects these coincidences as a miracle, in its eagerness to warn their values."

"People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they?re going deaf, it has to be played louder still."

"Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable."

"People do need some commandment to rule over them in our century, when god's ten have been virtually forgotten! The whole moral structure of our time rests on the eleventh commandment; and the journalist came to realize that thanks to a mysterious provision of history he is to become its administrator, gaining a power undreamed of by a Hemingway or an Orwell."

"People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation."

"People are liquidated so that they are first deducted memory. They destroy their books, education, history. Someone else they write another book, to give them more education and invent another history. And then people gradually begin to forget what it was and what it is now, and the world around him to forget much faster."

"People are screaming that they want to create a better future, but it's not true. The future, it is just indifferent emptiness that no one cares about, but the past is full of life and her face irritate us, irritates, offends, so we want to destroy or repaint. People want to be masters of the future, just to be able to change the past. They fight for entry into the laboratory in which touches up photos and biographies and histories rewritten."

"People often say to get rid of the future will escape; time into the path of an imaginary draw a line, that line beyond the current troubles, and shortages will end they think."

"People do not make sense beliefs, those who cry for joy over roofs usually are all sad."

"People don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure."

"Perhaps I love you. Perhaps I love you very much. But probably just for this reason it would be better if we remain as we are. I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don't live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness."

"People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all."

"Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now."

"Physical love is unthinkable without violence."

"Pick me up, is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently."

"Questions that remain unanswered are referring to the limits of human potential, a paint which limits our existence"

"Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."

"Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn?t expect much from her re-unions."

"Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn?t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it."

"Punishing people who don't know what they've done is barbaric. Forgive them for they know not what they do."

"Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing."

"Revolution in Love. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?"

"Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits."

"Sabina?s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear ? in other words, Communist kitsch."

"Sacrifice for the country life: All people know the price of this offering. Czechs enemies, Germany and Russia, know what it is, but they are big nations are so different at their patriotism: the giddiness of the glory of their attack, their importance, and it is their universal mission. Czechs have always loved their homeland not because he was a celebrity and was great, but because it was not, not because they were big, but because it was small and it is constantly under threat. Their patriotism towards the country's enormous compassion."

"Saw the tears tentacles who wanted to get him to wrest the idyll of its non-target: tears repelled him."

"Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness."

"Selecting something that we or our failure to look upon our own virtue cannot."

"She began to teeter as she walked, fell almost daily, bumped into things or, at the very least, dropped objects. She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo. 'Pick me up,' is the message of a person who keeps falling."

"She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body!"

"Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound."

"She felt attracted by their weakness as by vertigo. She felt attracted by it because she felt weak herself. Again she began to feel jealous and again her hands shook. When Tomas noticed it, he did what he usually did: he took her hands in his and tried to calm them by pressing hard. She tore them away from him."

"She fixed him with a long careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony's intelligent sparkle"

"She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women, Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.The only things she said when he released her from his embrace was, 'You don't know how happy I am to be with you.' That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express."

"She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women"

"She introduced herself as an ordinary woman did not know how she had hurt him."