Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it’s a piece of humbug.
Dignity: the doomed man’s final refuge.
All that remains is the mad desire for present identity through a woman.
When you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?
The dignity of man is in free choice.
We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes – or rather, we’ve seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.
I don’t believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.
Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.
Cause and effect are never divided between two people.
Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight.
A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.
There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that’s something no police in the world can spot.
Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense.
Why do dying people never shed tears?
I know that I’m the happiest of lovers...
Travelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic.
Stillertook part in the Spanish Civil WarIt is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined – a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.
Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don’t want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn’t always fun, you can’t always be in form. Moreover, I have learned from experience that once you are not in form women don’t remain in form either; as soon as they are bored they start complaining you’ve no feeling.
Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are...
I called her a sentimentalist and artsy-craftsy. She called me Homo Faber.