I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all....

As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated...

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few...

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author...

Le roman n’est pas une confession de l’auteur, mais une exploration de ce qu’est la vie humaine dans le piège qu’est devenu le monde.

Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren’t all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool,...

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that...

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from...

Al igual que todos nosotros, Klima también consideraba real únicamente aquello que llega a nuestra vida desde dentro, gradual, orgánicamente, mientras que a lo que llega desde fuera, inesperada y casualmente, lo veía como si...

En travaux pratiques de physique, n’importe quel collégien peut faire des expériences pour vérifier l’exactitude d’une hypothèse scientifique. Mais l’homme, parce qu’il n’a qu’une seule vie, n’a aucune possibilité de vérifier l’hypothèse par l’expérience de...

The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes...

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything….The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There...

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays,...

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?

In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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

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...

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.

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

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...