Whe you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief requires a tremendous effort and the proper training.
I am obedient. I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist.
He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn’t help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.
That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us.
All predictions are wrong, that’s one of the few certainties granted to mankind. 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.
Unintentional beauty. Another way of putting it might be ‘beauty by mistake’. Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. Beauty by mistake – the final phase in the history of beauty.
To be absolutely modern is to be the ally of one’s grave diggers.
You must admit: it’s not easy to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it’s not easy to become intimate with them, its not easy to love them.
Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.
She surrendered her body to the judgment of someone else’s eyes- and that was a source of anxious uncertainty.
The life we have left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court.
Elisabeth, can’t you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn’t go to bed with him?
He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.
I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect.
She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.
Everyone is wrong about the future.
The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. If we cannot change the world, let’s at least change our lives and live them freely.
The scene taking place illustrates an immemorial error of men: having appropriated the role of seducers, they never even consider any women but the ones they might desire; the idea doesn’t occur to them that a woman who is ugly or old, or who simply stands outside their own erotic imaginings, might want to possess them.