The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his...

No es la necesidad, sino la casualidad, la que está llena de encantos, si el amor debe ser inolvidable, las casualidades deben volar hacia él desde el primer momento

El amor, por definición, es un regalo no merecido; ser amado sin mérito es incluso la prueba de un amor verdadero.

The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be...

El hombre lo vive todo a la primera y sin preparación. Como si un actor representase su obra sin ningún tipo de ensayo. Pero ,qué valor puede tener la vida si el primer ensayo para...

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to...

Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and...

and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other...

Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

Una satisfacción que tiene la obligación de cubrir el puesto de otras satisfacciones se convierte rápidamente en una satisfacción demasiado cansada.

I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do...

Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my...

Every situation is of man’s making and can only contain what man contains.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

(…) the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes...

Even painful memories are ties that bind.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God’s image. Either/or:...

The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.

Bedensel sevgi şiddetsiz düşünülemez.

…because love is continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.

Hacer el amor con una mujer y dormir con una mujer son dos pasiones no sólo distintas sino casi contradictorias. El amor no se manifiesta en el deseo de acostarse con alguien (este deseo se...

Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

La vida humana acontece sólo una vez y por eso nunca podremos averiguar cuáles de nuestras decisiones fueron correctas y cuáles fueron incorrectas. En la situación dada sólo hemos podido decidir una vez y no...

He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of...

Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue – perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

Tandis qu’il se mouvait sur elle, en avant puis en arrière, il lui semblait décrire sans cesse le même mouvement, de l’enfance à l’ ge adulte puis en sens inverse, et encore une fois du...

If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as...

Le grand secret de la vie ne lui était pas inconnu : les femmes ne recherchent pas le bel homme, les femmes recherchent l’homme qui a eu de belles femmes.

He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

In the political jargon of those days, the word “intellectual” was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at...

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that’s alive. My self...

For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.

The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design,...

No hay razón para dar prioridad a los monumentos ante la vida; su propio monumento sólo tiene en este momento una significación: puede utilizarlo en provecho de su despreciado cuerpo; el hombreque está sentado a...

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions… The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery...

whether they knew of didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. (…) by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, “My conscience...

If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond “Es...

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the...

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map...

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the...

Nunca seremos capaces de establecer con seguridad en qué medida nuestras relaciones con los demás son producto de nuestros sentimientos, de nuestro amor, de nuestro desamor, bondad o maldad, y hasta qué punto son el...

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists...

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.

In the middle of the night, he woke up and realized to his surprise that he had been having one erotic dream after the other. The only one he could recall with any clarity was...

The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.