Ferdinand > Ferdinand's Quotes

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
― Kafka Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty,
nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such
awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.”
― Krzysztof Kieślowski, Kieslowski on Kieslowski

“Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“The glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“What moved me was the theme of the harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold experience of love. It's not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“You misinterpret everything, even the silence.”
― Franz Kafka, The Castle

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“We need time to lose interest in things.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Everything goes by — men, the seasons, the clouds, and there is no use clinging to the stones, no use fighting it out on some rock in midstream; the tired fingers open, the arms fall back inertly and you are still dragged into the river, the river which seems to flow so slowly yet never stops.”
― Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe

“I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett