Nic Sim > Recent Status Updates

To be wise was to be above joy and sorrow, fear and pity, ambition and humiliation. It was to hate nothing and to love nothing, and above all to be utterly indifferent to the love and hate of others. A truly wise man attached no importance to anything. Nothing could upset him and nothing could harm him.

A person may think that the fate of people who are sufficiently remote does not touch him. Yet all of a sudden he will catch sight of them in an unexpected situation, will recognise their unsuspected likeness to him, whether it be beautiful or terrible, and he realises that not only have they touched him, but they have actually entered into him. This is what happens so long as life isn't totally extinct in a person.

But those without souls […] move through the world and subconsciously try to reshape it in their own image. They fill the streets, the squares, the stadiums and the department stores. When they burst into cheers over a winning goal, a successful pop song or a revolution it seems as if that roar would go on forever, but it is followed at once by the deathly silence of emptiness and oblivion.

„I have found another remark by Kafka on the mission of literature: What we need, he wrote, are books which strike us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, books which would make us feel that we've been driven out into the forest far from another human being, like suicide. A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.“

I recently read an article in an American weekly about how fourteen complete idiots incapable of speech had learned "jerkish', a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak,… the language of the future.

Like every man in love he invested the object of his adoration with excessive and deceptive hopes.

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence."

…living honestly comes in many different forms.

Whatever comes your way you must never interfere, because from this moment on your own opinion ceases to count. For that same reason you must go unarmed. You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise. You may only search and inquire, never judge. Always remember that.

I wonder why people never say anything real.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

All he could do was hope, and go on reading.

We speak only nonsense, everything we say is nonsense, but everything that is said to us is also nonsense, like everything that is said at all, in this world only nonsense has been said until now and, he said, only nonsense has actually and naturally been written, the writings we possess are only nonsense because they can only be nonsense, as history proves, he said.

When we cross the threshold of our fiftieth year we see ourselves as base and spine-less, the question is how long we can stand this condition. Lots of people kill themselves in their fifty-first year. For fifty years are absolutely enough. We become contemptible when we go past fifty and are still living. Now I'm the shameless one, I thought. I envied the dead. For a moment I hated them for their superiority.

…you too will be a nameless servant of power, with no will of your own. Who knows what use they will make of you? Maybe you'll help them persuade people to buy things they don't need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them. Yes, big things will be done in the human world with your help, wars started, empires founded…

They wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, aesthete's life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism. I decided to let it drop.
"I believe we could discuss the matter all
night without convincing each other," I said. "These discussions leading to nothing are really a waste of time."

He had to have this book - at any price.
At any price? That was easily said. Even if he had had more to offer this cranky Mr Coreander had given him clearly to understand that he would never sell him a single book. The situation was hopeless.

Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one can really explain why. Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them. Some sacrifice everything for a dream that can never come true. Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people.
Bastian's passion was books.

„I know several people who have the right to say: "Odi profanum vulgus" ("I hate the rabble"). But which of them can add triumphantly: "Et arceo" ("And keep it at a distance")? Too many handshakes debases one's character. If ever a man had an ivory tower well guarded by bars and locks, it was Eugene Delacroix.“