Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.
Being in love is an exhausting business.
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
youth is a marvelous garment
We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
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