Great Throughts Treasury

"Being a surgeon is to open the surface of things and see what is hidden inside."

"Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume to correct attitude to her unchosen faith. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as taking pride in it."

"Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."

"Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death."

"Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest."

"Being elected is a theological concept which means: without any merit, by a supernatural verdict, by free will, otherwise capricious God, one is chosen for something exceptional and extraordinary. It is in this belief that saints have found the strength to endure the most atrocious tortures. Theological concepts are reflected, as their own parody, in the triviality of our lives, each of us suffers (more or less) of the baseness of his ordinary life too and wants to escape and climbing. Each of us has experienced the illusion (greater or less) to be worthy of this elevation, being predestined and chosen for her."

"Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, whereas blonde hair symbolizes femininity, tenderness, weakness, and passivity. Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman. A princess can only be blonde. That's also why, to be as feminine as possible, women dye their hair yellow- but never black. I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul, said Bertlef doubtfully. It's not a matter of pigments. A blonde unconsciously adapts herself to her hair. Especially if the blonde is a brunette who dyes her hair yellow. She tries to be faithful to her hair color and behaves like a fragile creature, a shallow doll, she demands tenderness and service, courtesy and alimony, she's incapable of doing anything for herself, all refinement on the outside and coarseness on the inside. If black hair became a universal fashion, life on this world would clearly be better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved."

"Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood."

"Birds of fortuity flutter down on her shoulders."

"Between the victim and the executioner, between the revolutionary and the officer between the bureaucracy and the dissident, there is a connivance vocabulary, obsessions, mental stereotypes that restrict, reduce, limit our vision of man. I sympathize with the victim against the executioner, the dissident against the bureaucracy, but to get closer to the truth, I must break the narrow circle of their dispute deceptively claiming to be the real heart."

"Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain."

"Business has only two functions ? marketing and innovation."

"But all he could think of was what Sabina would have said about it. Everything he did, he did for Sabina, the way Sabina would have liked to see it done. It was a perfectly innocent form of infidelity and one eminently suited to Franz, who would never have done his bespectacled student-mistress any harm. He nourished the cult of Sabina more as a religion than as love"

"But deep down she said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness."

"But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorc‚e-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal."

"But I'm not dead! Tereza cried. I can still feel! So can we, the corpses laughed."

"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"

"But it is precisely the weak who must be strong and know when to leave the fort is too weak to be able to hurt the weak"

"But in Ithaca was not a stranger, he was one of them and it did not occur to them that one says to him provisions."

"But it is the weak who must know how to be strong and go away, when the fort is too weak to hurt the weak."

"But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man?s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously the image of life?s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a 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?"

"But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us"

"But just to show you the weak force and go, as the strong too weak to be able to hurt the weak."

"But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away."

"But it is rather just the opposite, that an event is all the more significant and favored many incidentals involved in determining it? Only the case can appear as a message. What happens to need, what is expected, which is repeated every day, everything is mute. Only the case speaks to us. Let us read in as gypsies read the images formed by the coffee grounds in a cup."

"But no carnival can go on forever."

"But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not."

"But the longer a man grows in his own darkness, the more his outer form diminishes."

"But the right to chide man because he is blind to the 'coincidence' that occurs in everyday life. Because then, he removes the dimensions of the beauty of life."

"But there was something more precious than his poems; something far away he didn?t yet possess and longed for?manliness; he knew that it could only be attained by action and courage; and if courage meant courage to be rejected, rejected by everything, by the beloved woman, by the painter, and even by his own poems?so be it: he wanted to have that courage. And so he said: Yes, I know that the revolution has no need for my poems. I regret that, because I like them. But unfortunately my regret is no argument against their useless-ness. Again there was silence, and then one of the men said: This is dreadful, and he actually shuddered as if a chill had run down his spine. Jaromil felt the horror his words had produced in everyone there, that they were seeing in him the living disappearance of everything they loved, everything that made life worthwhile. It was sad but also beautiful: within the space of an instant, Jaromil lost the feeling of being a child."

"But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment."

"But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless."

"But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?"

"But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything."

"But what, in fact, happened with Sabina? It's nothing. She left one man because she wanted him to leave. He subsequently pursued her? Avenged her? No. Her drama was not the drama of gravity and lightness. At Sabina pulled hard not severity, and unbearable lightness of being."

"But when the force was too weak to hurt the weak, the weakness to be strong enough to go around."

"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."

"But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces."

"By establishing an acquaintance with Lucie, I too had set my destiny in motion; but I did not lose sight of it. Though we didn't meet very often, at least our meetings were fairly regular, and I knew she was capable of waiting several weeks and then greeting me as if we'd seen each other the day before"

"By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, Throw me out! But instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the Devil?s gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas?s fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina?s letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more."

"Can you imagine a lie deserves another, but you're wrong. I can invent anything, I pay people's heads, mount all sorts of hoaxes, make all kinds of jokes, I did not feel like a liar these lies there, if you want to call it lies, it's me, as I am, with these lies, I do not hide anything with these lies then I'm saying is the truth. But there are things about which I cannot lie. THERE are things that I know fully, I understood the meaning, and love. I do not mess with these things. Lying on it, it would reduce me myself, and I cannot do, does not require it of me, I will not do."

"By writing books, a man turns into a universe."

"By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, it, he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors."

"Can't you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of man?s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."

"Can any student through the process of doing exercises physics, that being certain experiments to prove the scientific validity of the assumption. The man does not have only one life and does not have any possibility to prove the hypothesis through the experience. So he will never be known if he was right or not to comply when he felt."

"Cannot see a striking disproportion between the insignificance of the cause and the enormity of the act? Do not know if you planned to do was excessive? Yes, but precisely what attracted him was excessive. I did not want to be reasonable. I did not want to be restrained. I did not want to measure, I did not argue. He admired his own passion, knowing that passion, by definition, is overkill. How drunk did not want to leave that drunk."

"Certainly not necessary, but the case is full of magic. If love is to be unforgettable, from the first moment it must rest on the coincidences, like the birds on the shoulders of Francis of Assisi."

"Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time."

"Chantal feels safe, because the voice of Jean-Marc is the voice of love, the voice whose existence was forgotten in those moments of confusion, the voice of love that cherishes and relaxing, but which is not yet prepared, as if the voice came from far away, too far, still have to listen long enough to believe in it."

"Chance has its charms, not the need. For an unforgettable love, it is necessary that the hazards are in it from the first moment like birds on the shoulders of St. Francis of Assisi."