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“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.”
― War and Peace
― War and Peace
“And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit.”
― The Man Without Qualities: Volume I
― The Man Without Qualities: Volume I
“Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so to the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation.”
― The Denial of Death
― The Denial of Death
“People were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that has always been the image of a lunatic.”
― The Man Without Qualities
― The Man Without Qualities
“For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.”
― The Man Without Qualities: Volume I
― The Man Without Qualities: Volume I
Elisabeth’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Elisabeth’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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