All Quotes By Tag: Literature

“How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.”

“I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn’t stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.”

“For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.”

“For a game, you don’t need a teacher.”

“Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.”

“The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.”

“It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.”

“What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.”

“a spider and a flyi heard a spiderand a fly arguingwait said the flydo not eat mei serve a great purposein the worldyou will have toshow me said the spideri scurry aroundgutters and sewersand garbage canssaid the fly and gatherup the germs oftyphoid influenzaand pneumonia on my feetand wingsthen i carry these germsinto households of menand give them diseasesall the people whohave lived the rightsort of life recoverfrom the diseasesand the old soaks whohave weakened their systemswith liquor and iniquitysuccumb it is my missionto help rid the worldof these wicked personsi am a vessel of righteousnessscattering seeds of justiceand serving the noblest usesit is true said the spiderthat you are moreuseful in a ploddingmaterial sort of waythan i am but i do notserve the utilitarian deitiesi serve the gods of beautylook at the gossamer websi weave they float in the sunlike filaments of songif you get what i meani do not work at anythingi play all the timei am busy with the stuffof enchantment and the materialsof fairyland my workstranscend utilityi am the artista creator and demi godit is ridiculous to supposethat i should be deniedthe food i need in orderto continue to createbeauty i tell youplainly mister fly it is alldamned nonsense for that foodto rear up on its hind legsand say it should not be eatenyou have convinced mesaid the fly say no moreand shutting all his eyeshe prepared himself for dinnerand yet he said i couldhave made out a casefor myself too if i hadhad a better line of talkof course you could said the spiderclutching a sirloin from himbut the end would have beenjust the same if neither ofus had spoken at allboss i am afraid that whatthe spider said is trueand it gives me to thinkfuriously upon the futilityof literaturearchy”

“I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful”

“The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.”

“A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.”

“أسمع من المحيط إلى الخليج أن من لا يقدر على إفهامنا لم تحل معادلات الدرجة الثانية بالطريقة التي تحل بها يخرف حول ابستمولوجية السقوط الحر ونسبية اينشتاين خلطا بين التعليقات الإيديولوجية والنفسية على مايزعم جاريا في وعي العلماء وتصوراتهم وبين فهم آليات الإبداع العلمي وقوانينه”

“They grew; they did not talk about growing.”

“Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.”