Great Throughts Treasury

"Time does not change us. It just unfolds us."

"Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it."

"It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life."

"Above all, however, the machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man. "

"Technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance,... the technologist's worldlessness.... My mistake lay in the fact that we technologists try to live without death. "

"Thou shalt not, it is said, make unto thee any graven image of God. The same commandment should apply when God is taken to mean the living part of every human being, the part that cannot be grasped. It is a sin that, however much it is committed against us, we almost continually commit ourselves—Except when we love. "

"It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans. "

"My greatest fear: repetition. "

"The technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living. "

"I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability. "

"In view of the fact that the number of people living too long has risen catastrophically and still continues to rise.... Question: Must we live as long as modern medicine enables us to?... We control our entry into life, it is time we began to control our exit. "

"A real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive.... It's difficult to say what makes a life a real life.... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself. "

"Jealousy is the fear of comparison. "

"A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth. "

"We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes—or rather we have seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are tele- viewers, tele-hearers, tele-knowers. "

"Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge. "

"Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism! "

"Nothing is harder than to accept oneself. "

"We know that every person who is loved feels transformed, unfolded, and he unfolds everything, the most intimate as well as the most familiar, to the one who loves him as well as to himself.... The person one loves is as ungraspable as the universe, as God's infinite space, he is boundless, full of possibilities, full of secrets. "

"If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one. "

"It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living. "

"Travelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic."

"A person who does not concern himself with politics has already made the political choice we was so anxious to spare himself: he is serving the ruling party."

"A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity."

"A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society."

"Cause and effect are never divided between two people"

"Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance?"

"Are you friend with yourself?"

"Carrying on with the conversation like a woman when the bill comes."

"Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous."

"Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug."

"Do you know what you need?"

"'Everything that is human looks like a special case'."

"How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses."

"I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate."

"I have no words for my reality."

"I know that I'm the happiest of lovers."

"I live, like every real man, in my work."

"Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight."

"How can we ever judge a human being when he is and he will always be another person."

"He knows that every piece of self-knowledge which one cannot keep to oneself makes one smaller and smaller, he knows that he who cannot keep silent his wishes to be recognized in the greatness of his self-knowledge which is no self-knowledge if it cannot be kept silent, and one becomes hypersensitive one feels betrayed because one wants to be recognized by people, one becomes ridiculous ambitious in inverse ratio to ones self-knowledge."

"Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?"

"How much frankness can we stand in a friend?"

"If on some occasion I happen to read something in it ? because, for instance, I need to know a date ? I am always disconcerted to find that two or five years ago I came to exactly the same conclusion, only to forget it because I had not succeeded in living up to it; in fact, I had tenaciously been doing the very opposite."

"Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful."

"It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that make them a couple."

"My reality doesn't lie in the part I play, but in the unconscious decision as to what kind of part I assign to myself."

"Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing."

"It is a sign of non-love that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of ones neighbors."

"One can be resolved to promote good, or one can be resolved to be a good person- Two separate things that are mutually exclusive."