He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed.
Quien busque infinito, que cierre los ojos.
Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
To laugh is to live profoundly.