Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
Communism is fascism with a human face.
Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms- the animation, the fits.
Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
For a woman, aging is not only her destiny... it is also her vulnerability.
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary- are, in the largest sense, political.
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Interpretation is revenge of the intellect upon art.
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
It is not the position, but the disposition.
Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
Love dies because its birth was an error.
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible.
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and ten percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
Found 39 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).
Categories: Quotes of the day
KGB Quotation Database Search page design and software
contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
