Great Throughts Treasury

"I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. "

"For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? "

"Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought."

"My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form."

"If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es Muss sein!"

"It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape. After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story."

"Inexperience is a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only; we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from a 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 of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience."

"Love is a constant interrogation."

"A breach illusion unmasked value and usually have the same body mortified look, and there is nothing easier than to confuse them."

"1. In essence the world is based on the nonexistence of return. Everything in this world is forgiven in advance and, therefore, everything cynically permitted. 2. We can never know what we should want for one are living - and only life can neither compare it with their previous lives or fix it in subsequent lives. 3. There is no way to check which solution is best, because there is no comparison. We live all the time, and for the first time without training. As if the actor playing his role in the play without any rehearsal. But what is life worth if the first rehearsal as it has been life itself? 4. Once - the same as ever. If we are to live one single life - it means we have not lived at all. 5. Do not become an event so remarkable and exceptional, the greater the number of accidents resulting in him? 6. That accident full of magic, it need not know. 7. Man who dreams of leaving the place where he lives, clearly unhappy. 8. Extremes - it limits beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and politics, are disguised death wish. 9. What gives meaning to our actions is always something for us both innocent and totally. 10. As soon as you can divide people for some categories, especially for those deep biases that lifelong orient them to a particular activity. 11. Who is looking for infinity, let a blind eye! 12. True human goodness in all its purity and freedom can only manifest itself in relation to someone who has very little power. 13. This is a moment when love is born: a woman cannot resist the voice that calls out her terrified soul, a man cannot resist the woman whose soul is responsive in his voice. 14. Happiness - it's thirst for repetition. 15. If the excitation - a mechanism by which amused our Creator, the love, on the contrary, belongs only to us, we used it escapes from the Creator. Love - is our freedom."

"A blonde, whether real or dyed, unconsciously adapts herself to her hair. She tries to turn herself into a fragile being, a doll, a princess, she demands tenderness and courtesy, gallantry and compliments, she is unable to do anything for herself, all sweetness on the outside and bitchiness on the inside. If dark hair were to become fashionable, the whole world would be a pleasanter place. It would be the most useful social reform ever attempted."

"A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself."

"A man is responsible for his ignorance."

"A doctor is a person who agrees, for all my life and with all the consequences of dealing with the human body. And 'this fundamental consensus (and certainly not the talent or ability) that allows the first year of college to enter the hall of anatomy and six years later to become a doctor."

"A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions."

"A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. 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."

"A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers."

"A decision weight is linked to the voice of the destination, weight, necessity and value are three concepts internally united: only what is necessary, has weight, only that which has weight, right."

"A man who loses his privacy loses everything... a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster."

"A man possessed with peace is always smiling."

"A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."

"A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become; everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities."

"A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love."

"A novel is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas, it questions, it marvels, it doesn't judge, nor proclaims truths."

"A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead."

"A person who messes up her goodbyes should not expect much from her reunions."

"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."

"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."

"A single metaphor can give birth to love."

"A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth."

"A person who thinks should not try to persuade others to his belief; that is what puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the man of conviction; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? It is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the man of conviction is a man restricted."

"A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence."

"A whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing."

"A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea."

"A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade. When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country? She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject."

"Adventure, the first great theme of the novel."

"A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue something higher- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books."

"Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow."

"Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously."

"Agnes remembered as a child fascinated with the idea that God sees, and sees non-stop. I felt then for the first time without a doubt, these fun, so savoring the odd felt by humans because they see, they see to hate them, they see in Hzathm intimacy, see and violate given, her mother, a card, telling her, God sees you, hoping to be carried on abandon the habit of lying and nail-biting and crammed fingers in the nose, but the opposite is that was happening. It was Agnes imagine God and show him what to do specifically when dealing these bad habits, or in the moments that caused her shame."

"Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us. When God bade mankind be fruitful and multiply, Doctor, He was thinking of the ugly as well as of the beautiful. I am convinced I might add, that the aesthetic criterion does not come from God but from the devil. In paradise no distinction was made between ugliness and beauty."

"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual."

"Alas! In the case of very little love is enough to sow despair in the soul!"

"All novels? are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?"

"All man's conviction in this sentence there is a circular human time will not it pass, but the straight line going. Why man cannot be happy because happiness is wanting to repeat!"

"All languages that derive from Latin form the word compassion by combining the prefix meaning with (com-) and the root meaning suffering (Late Latin, passio). In other languages, Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means feeling. In languages that derive from Latin, compassion means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, pity, connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. To take pity on a woman means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word compassion generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love."

"All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind."

"All that matters is that one is as it is, not blush from being wants what he wants, wants as it wants. People Obaid standards. Someone once said, it is one should be like this or that, and when that diligent in that Econoh, will never know what they do not Mahm it, and therefore they are not one. One must, above all, to dare to be the same."

"All of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others."

"All of us in what part of ourselves we live and behind the times, perhaps we are not aware of our age, except in extraordinary moments, and we most of the time without people ages."