(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

Erklären heißt verzeihen, erklärt zu werden heißt Verzeihung erlangen […]

I don’t know what you do about sex and I don’t want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You’re what – fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds...

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as...

Die Sache mit dem Sündenbock funktionierte wirklich, als noch religiöse Kraft dahinterstand. Man lud dem Ziegenbock die Sünden der Stadt auf und trieb ihn hinaus, und die Stadt war gereinigt. Es funktionierte, weil alle, einschließlich...

He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Shaw. He avoids saying to her ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ in order...

There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.

Wenn man mich drängen würde, meine politische Denkweise mit einem Etikett zu versehen, würde ich sie pessimistisch-anarchistischen Quietismus nennen, oder anarchistisch-quietistischen Pessismismus oder pessimistisch-quietistischen Anarchismus: Anarchismus, weil die Erfahrung mir sagt, was an der Politik...

Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one...

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the...

Vergnügen ist Mangelware, aber an Schmerz ist heute überall ranzukommen.

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no...

Konkurrenz ist eine Sublimierung von Krieg.

Sigue dedicándose a la enseñanza […] porque así aprende la virtud de la humildad, porque así comprende con toda claridad cuál es su lugar en el mundo. No se le escapa la ironía, a saber,...

From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the...

What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?

In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are...

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this...

Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is...

He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep...

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist....

…we can pretend that the book in question is not Mr. West’s but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

The heart can be a mysterious organ, the heart and its movements. Dark, the Spanish call it. The dark heart, el oscuro cotazón. Are you sure you are not just a little dark-hearted, Paul, despite...

Den Staat kümmert nicht, ob der Bürger lebt oder stirbt. Wichtig für den Staat und sein Archiv ist, ob der Bürger am Leben oder tot ist.

Diese Haltung zur Opferung von Menschenleben ist seltsam. Militärbefehlshaber überlegen nicht zweimal, wenn sie Soldaten in die Schlacht schicken und dabei genau wissen, dass viele von ihnen sterben werden. […] Andererseits verbietet es der Offiziersethos,...

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.

Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

[I]n Amerika wird das Modell des Ich als ein Geist, der eine Maschine bewohnt, auf volkstümlicher Ebene fast unbestritten hingenommen.