Great Throughts Treasury

"To love someone out of compassion means not really to love."

"To put it another way, every love relationship is based upon unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!"

"To occupy the stage he must repel others. This implies a special fighting technique. the struggle of the dancer, Pontevin called the moral judo dancer throws down the gauntlet to the world: that is able to be more moral (more courageous, more honest, more sincere, more willing to sacrifice more truthful) than he? And handles all sockets that allow him to put the other in a situation morally inferior."

"To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."

"To those who believe that the communist regimes in Central Europe are exclusively the creation of criminals escaped them the main truth: the criminal regimes were the work of criminals, but of enthusiastic people firmly believe they have found the only way to heaven. They defended valiantly that his conviction and in behalf eradicated many. Later it became clear to all that there is no paradise and therefore enthusiastic people were killers."

"To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring ? it was peace."

"To where, added Leroy, resides the answer to your question: why are we living? what is essential in life? He looked hard at the lady. The essential, in life, is to perpetuate life: it is childbirth, and what precedes it, coitus, and what precedes coitus, seduction, that is to say kisses, hair floating in the wind, silk underwear, well-cut brassieres, and everything else that makes people ready for coitus, for instance good chow - not fine cuisine, a superfluous thing no one appreciates anymore, but the chow everyone buys - and along with chow, defecation, because you know, my dear lady, my beautiful adored lady, you know what an important position the praise of toilet paper and diapers occupies in our profession. Toilet paper, diapers, detergents, chow. That is man's sacred circle, and our mission is not only to discover it, seize it, and map it but to make it beautiful, to transform it into song. Thanks to our influence, toilet paper is almost exclusively pink, and that is a highly edifying fact, which, my dear and anxious lady, I would recommend that you contemplate seriously."

"Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time."

"Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics."

"Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are to 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)."

"Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, un-encompass-able, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense."

"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."

"Toilets of modern bathrooms rise from the ground like a white lily flower. Architects do the impossible for the body to forget his misery and that man does not know what happens to excreta of their guts when water from the toilet, gurgling, driving them away from view. Although its tentacles extending to our homes, sewer pipes are carefully disguised so we know absolutely nothing about the invisible Venices fucking on which are built our bathrooms, our rooms, our salons . prom and our parliaments. The bathrooms that old building in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Prague were less hypocritical; gray tile floor, stood up, and miserable orphan, the toilet. did not remember a flower of water lily, but on the contrary, evoked what actually was: the place where the pipe ended and widened its diameter. Even had soundboard wood and Tereza had to sit directly on the enamel lio‡a, felt a cold shiver."

"Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams."

"Tomas said, sleep with a woman and sleep with her, here are two not only different, but almost contradictory passions. Love manifests itself not by the desire to make love (this desire applies to countless multitude women) but by the desire for shared sleep (this desire relates to only one woman)."

"Tomas turned the key and switched on the ceiling light. Teraza saw two beds pushed together, one of them flanked by a bedside table and a lamp. Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below."

"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. And so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."

"Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good."

"Translators tend to enrich the dictionary: Testing (instead of there), went so far , went farther, entered deeper (instead of further away ) can choke , gasps (instead of suffocates ), foot (instead of go). (Note horror felt by all translators in the world by the words I and I! They are ready to do anything to replace them with the word considered not so trivial.)"

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.' 'They could be silent.' 'Like those two, at the next table?' Jean Marc laughed. 'Oh, no, no love can survive muteness."

"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals."

"Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one."

"Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?"

"Unity: the absence of the tortured glances. One day I got sick and worked alone in the office, I noticed that she was amazed at the evening hardly feel tired. Making them aware that pregnancy looks fatigued, kisses suck blood, and that the probe is the one who looks dig wrinkles on her face."

"Understand me. Misogynist do not despise women. Misogynist dislike femininity. Men always fall into two broad categories. Worshipers of women, ie poets, and misogynistic, or rather, the gynophobes. Worshipers or poets venerate traditional feminine values ??like feeling, home, motherhood, fertility, the sacred hysteria lightnings, and the voice of divine nature within us as well as misogynistic or gynophobes these values ??inspire a slight fear. In women, the worshiper worships femininity, while the misogynist always gives preference to women about femininity. Remember one thing: a woman cannot be really happy with a misogynist."

"Uniformity would produce happiness, not boredom."

"We can imagine that without love to follow the impact of our image in the mind of the beloved? When it stops our way that we show it in front of love, it means we did not like."

"We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions -- love, antipathy, charity, or malice -- and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals."

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come... There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, sketch is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture."

"We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse."

"Vlasta criticizes me I'm a dreamer. It seems that I do not see things as they are. No, I see things as they are, but in addition to also see visible things invisible. Invented ideas are useless. Are precisely the ones who make our homes houses."

"Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

"We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the Es muss sein! to our own great love."

"We are all in need of a person looking at us. We can split up to four categories according to the type of view that we want to live under it. The first category, eager to look an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, look for the masses. The second category consists of people who have a need for MAS to consider by many known eyes. They do not get bored of hosting cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than present in the first class category, and who - when they lose their audience - feel that the light has left the living room, which is what happens to all of them - almost - sooner or later. Those in the second category, on the other hand, can usually come up with eye they need. Then there is the third category, a category of people you need to always be in sight of before the eyes of those who love them. They and their dangerous such as those living in the first category. Someday the eyes of those who love them will be closed, and then room. Finally, there is the fourth category, the rarest, this group of people living in the fictional eyes of people who do not exist. These are the dreamers."

"We are born one time only. We can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience."

"We are weak in front of you praise!!"

"We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration."

"We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help."

"We have reached an end when crossed by the world will turn everything into a frenzy: people will run in the streets carrying flowers Almyozotis, or would shoot at each other when he sees them. And very little will suffice, a drop of water makes the vase overflow: for example, a car or a man, or any sound plus street. There should not be quantified missed, but this is not a limitation watching him, and perhaps no one knows of its existence."

"We have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn?t love them? No one could be more innocent, in his soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done."

"We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it."

"We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means."

"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."

"We will never be able to establish with certainty the extent to which our relationships with others are a product of our feelings, our love, our hate, good or evil, and to what extent are the result of the relationship of forces between them and we."

"What distinguishes the educated person from self-taught, not the amount of knowledge, but varying degrees of vitality and self-confidence."

"What did he tell you with your gift? That was free. To live as he wanted to live, that was where I wanted to go. He never had dared. So he had given all the means at his daughter for her daring."

"What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating."

"What do you want me to do for you?"

"What happens necessarily, you need what is repeated every day is mute. Only chance speaks."

"What happens but once might as well not have happened at all."