The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods – romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.
The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.
We comes from God, I from the Devil.
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Don’t forget that we lawyers, we’re a higher breed of intellect, and so it’s our privilege to lie. It’s as clear as day. Animals can’t even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.
Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.
Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.
To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolutionary, the most immortal of them all.
I’ve read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom – that is, in disorganized wildness.
Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that’s all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you’re afraid to look on the other side of that wall.
All women are lips, nothing but lips.
The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox – the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.
Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter – even murder itself.
Explosions are not comfortable.
The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional – and not some other kind of reality.
And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.
What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they’d nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.