Pillsonista > Pillsonista's Quotes

“Besides, please bear in mind that no one with anything to say ever said anything about anybody but himself.”
― Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol

“But his sophistication is still juvenile, his ironies are still clumsy and obvious; when he ridicules Americans in Europe not very much simpler than himself, he reveals the callowness of the hunter by the pettiness of the game he pursues.”
― Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Once, in the South Atlantic, I saw a whaler in the process of killing a female accompanied by one of her offspring. The harpooner, a red-bearded Irishman, kept putting harpoons into the whale. The intestines were hanging out of the mangled body of the huge animal, and nevertheless it continued to swim back and forth in the water made red by its blood, trying with its shattered body to shield the little whale. Since then, and the sight of that harpooner's freckled face as he laughed derisively, and of that poor creature, faithful to the end, I have believed in the existence of Satan as I believe in the existence of God.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“The aims of life are the best defense against death.”
― Primo Levi

“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.”
― Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”
― Albert Camus

“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.”
― Adam Zagajewski, A Defense of Ardor: Essays

“Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.”
― A.J. Liebling, Mollie and Other War Pieces

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“Life without playing music is inconceivable for me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music, I get most joy in life out of music.”
― Albert Einstein

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”
― Clive James

“When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
― Clive James, Latest Readings

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.”
― Albert Schweitzer