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...

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.

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...

Even painful memories are ties that bind.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

Właśnie takie detale: źle dobrany strój, drobna wada uzębienia, czarująca przeciętność duszy, czynią kobietę prawdziwą i żywą. Kobiety z plakatów czy z rewii mody, do których wszystkie starają się dziś upodobnić, nie są pociągające, ponieważ...

[mother] belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away.

Sí, de repente lo ví así: la mayoría de la gente se engaña mediante una doble creencia errónea: cree en el eterno recuerdo (de la gente, de las cosas, de los actos, de las naciones)...

The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and...

It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty...

(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.

As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: “Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless”; it “force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear...

Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows...

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle,...

Los amores son como los imperios: cuando desaparece la idea sobre la cual han sido construidos, perecen ellos también.