Great Throughts Treasury

"The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and un-interchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism."

"The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry... Unintentional beauty. Yes. Another way of putting it might be 'beauty by mistake."

"The beauty of unintentionally is the last stage of the history of beauty."

"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten."

"The best actors do not let the wheels show."

"The book is the emblem of a secret brotherhood. Because it is only one weapon to combat roughness surrounding world, i.e... books... even more important is the books he had read the novel."

"The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul."

"The brevity of his life makes the sky a dark lid against which he will forever crack his head, to fall back onto earth, where everything alive eats and can be eaten."

"The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."

"The burden, the need and importance are three internally interrelated concepts: just what is needed is weight only what it weighs, is significant."

"The extremes delimit the boundary beyond which life ends, and passion for extremism, both in art and in politics, is a death wish disguised."

"The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated."

"The fact that until recently the word ?shit? appeared in print as s? has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can?t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. ? The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. ? Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."

"The constitution did indeed guarantee freedom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security."

"The churches failed to realize that the working-class movement was the movement of the humiliated and oppressed supplicating for justice. They did not choose to work with and for them to create the kingdom of God on earth. By siding with the oppressors, they deprived the working-class movement of God. And now they reproach it for being godless. The Pharisees!"

"The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out the mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So, during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes focused on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer."

"The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other."

"The engineer?s ready capitulation, however, did not hide from the poet?s mother the sad realization that the adventure into which she had plunged so impulsively--and which had seemed so intoxicatingly beautiful--had no turned out to be the great, mutually fulfilling love she was convinced she had a full right to expect. Her father was the owner of two prosperous Prague pharmacies, and her morality was based on strict give-and-take. For her part, she had invested everything in love (she had even been willing to sacrifice her parents and their peaceful existence); in turn, she had expected her partner to invest an equal amount of capital of feelings in the common account. To redress the imbalance, she gradually withdrew her emotional deposit and after the wedding presented a proud, severe face to her husband."

"The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting."

"The epic womanizers, is moving further in their quest of knowledge, conventional feminine beauty, who have grown tired quickly, and inevitably end up as collectors of curiosities"

"The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past."

"The first treason cannot be repaired, a raise by the results of other proliferating infidelities distract us where each one of them more and more for the first point of treason."

"The girl sank into a deep sadness, but also anger than he had felt. Love means giving everything he knew. Literally everything, and full of shame, that despite everything, her love could not dare dream it. What was ridiculous! Too ridiculous to him crying."

"The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."

"The great secret of life was not unknown to him: women do not seek handsome man, women seek the man who had beautiful women."

"The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."

"The feeling, the irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life there are windows now, windows opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced; from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows."

"The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.' 'Do I look like a liar?' 'You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women."

"The feeling of being elected is present, for example, in any relationship. For love, by definition, is an undeserved gift; loved without merit, it is even evidence of a true love. If a woman told me: I love you because you're smart, because you're honest, because you buy me gifts, because you do not dredge, because you're doing the dishes, I'm disappointed, this Love looks something interested. How beautiful it is to hear: I'm crazy about you though thou be neither intelligent nor honest, but you are a liar, selfish bastard."

"The good Lord was unfair to give such a beautiful face to that jerk and short legs Lermontov. But if the poet did not have long legs, has a sarcastic that pulls the heights spirit."

"The idea that he is incapable of doing anything drenched in a state of stunned and allay magnificence of that one."

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"

"The invention of the locomotive contains the germ plan planes that inevitably leads to space rockets. This is the logic contained in the things themselves, or, to say otherwise, is part of the divine plan. You can replace all of humanity to another, there will be an evolution that goes from the bike to the Rockets remain unchanged. Man is not the author of this evolution, but only executor. Even poor performer, because he has not known the meaning of what is executed. This sense does not belong to us, it belongs to God alone, and we are here to listen to be able to do what I like."

"The heavier the load, the more down to earth is our life, more real and true will. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to become lighter than air, fly upwards, distance itself from the earth ground of his being, that is only half true and his movements as free as insignificant. Then what are we to choose? Does the weight or lightness? What happens only once is like never happened. If man can only live one life is as if he lived at all. The weight, necessity and value are three concepts internally united. Only what is necessary, has weight, only that which has weight, it. There where the heart speaks, it's rude that contradicts reason. * Human time does not turn round, but follows a straight path. That is why man cannot be happy, because happiness is the desire to repeat."

"The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"

"The intellectual word in the political jargon of the time, was an insult. He pointed to a man who does not understand the life that is cut off from the people. All communists who were hanged in that time by other communists were rewarded with this injury. Unlike those who firmly grounded, they hovered, it was said somewhere in the air. So it was just, in a sense, the earth was finally refused by punishment to their feet and remain suspended just above the ground."

"The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal."

"The illusion that makes us consider the situation of our life as a simple decoration, and interchangeable contingent circumstance that transits our self, independent and constant."

"The irony irritates. Not because mocks or attacks, but because it deprives us of the certainties, unveiling the world as ambiguity."

"The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."

"The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic."

"The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish."

"The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic."

"The man is nothing more than your image. Philosophers may say that it is irrelevant what the world thinks of us, only what we are worth. But philosophers do not understand anything. As we live with people, we are nothing more than what people think you are."

"The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man."

"The man raised his glass, 'To you!' Can't you think of a wittier toast?' Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl's game. Now sitting face to face with her, he realized it wasn't just the words which were turning her into a stranger, but that her whole persona had changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled that type of woman whom he knew so well and for whom he felt some aversion. And so (holding his glass in his raised hand), he corrected his toast: 'O.K., then I won't drink to you, but to your kind, in which are combined so successfully the better qualities of the animal and the worse aspects of the human being."

"The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded."

"The man is going through all the first time and without preparation. As an actor who plays the show without any rehearsal. So how then is there to life if the first rehearsal of life but life itself? Life is always so similar to the sketch."

"The meaning of poetry is not to dazzle us with an amazing idea, but to make a moment of being memorable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia."

"The man without knowing composes his life according to the laws of beauty and moments of deepest despair."