Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.
Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
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.
In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's.
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
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.
The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.