Mankind’s real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.
Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
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.
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn’t possibly hurt her.
Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous – like God!
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.