Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey

Hungarian Writer and Author

"Our whole civilization is based on a hypothetical future and the idiocy of fortune-telling."

"A man's virtues, it seems to me, are his abilities, and his vices are his deficiencies."

"Another person's ego is the most exquisite of delicacies, king's caviar - those who taste it can never resist it."

"As both capitalist and communist states -- not to mention the technological world --have evolved under the illusion that men purposefully built them, ideological optimism seeps into every niche of our lives. It is made worse by mass culture which feeds our"

"Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not."

"Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you."

"I had affairs with a few girls of my own age, and they taught me that no girl, however intelligent and war-hearted, can possibly know or feel half as much at twenty as she will at thirty-five."

"Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with."

"I submit that anyone who is trying to explain one thing in terms of something else has nothing important to say."

"Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders."

"One must start early to become a great man."

"Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the center of man's universe is the earth?"

"People will either like you for your money or they'll resent you for having it.. So you're stuck with a small group who are as rich as you are, and that doesn't give you much choice."

"Modesty is an excuse for sloppiness, laziness, self-indulgence; small ambitions evoke small efforts"

"'Oh God,' he groaned. 'I'd almost forgotten! What a relief it was when I stopped worrying about being good!'"

"Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination."

"Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth"

"Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it."

"The dream of a crook is a man with a dream."

"The good conscience of the wicked rest on all the villainies they refrain form committing."

"We live under the tyranny of various professional groups, and all the 'influence' we could bring to bear on the running of schools, trains or power stations isn't sufficient to move a feather."

"To be jealous of a woman one doesn't love is the most ridiculous form of vanity, but Hardwick, surrounded by people whose livelihood depended on him, had no idea that he could be ridiculous."

"The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in."

"The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test."

"There are millions of people who think that having heard about something is the same as knowing it, and their notion of culture is a mixture of elegant lifestyle and big names."

"We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them."

"When too many things are taken for granted, it is next to impossible to perceive the truth."

"With professionals she was professional: she concentrated on looking unimpressed."

"When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness."

"Women cannot always flow, and even when they do, they well up slowly, while men are quick as torrents - they are primed by nature to burst forth at different times... the twenty-minute gap, the abyss between the sexes."

"You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all."

"Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn?t play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn."

"I suppose it's more unnerving to be a boy than a girl,' she conceded. 'It's the boys who have to make fools of themselves."

"During all my wandering through two decades and two continents, I've found nothing more pathetic than the universal misery of young boys trying to charm young girls."

"I wonder, what kind of life would I have had if it hadn?t been for my mother?s tea-and-cookie parties? Perhaps it?s because of them that I?ve never thought of women as my enemies, as territories I have to conquer, but always as allies and friends - which I believe is the reason why they were friendly to me in turn. I?ve never met those she-devils you hear about: they must be too busy with those men who look upon women as a fortress they have to attack, lay waste and left in ruins."

"Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great."

"Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art ? but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life."

"I made a resolution I would throw myself into the Danube if I didn't ask you to make love with me today."

"We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang on to the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It?s less painful to think 'I'm shallow', 'She's self centred', 'We couldn't communicate', 'It was all just physical', than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling -- that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We're untrue even to life."