Great Throughts Treasury

"It is the sublime miracle of the human mind: memory."

"Montaigne the I-sayer. “I” as space, not as position."

"Life experience does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e.g., from Balzac, without any help from life."

"No mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State."

"Newspapers... help you forget the previous day."

"Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply."

"Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I."

"One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation."

"One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering."

"One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it."

"One should tell oneself how fruitful misunderstandings are. One shouldn’t despise them. One of the wisest people was a collector of misunderstandings."

"One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others."

"Paranoia is an illness of power."

"One who, alone, would be unconquerable. But he weakens himself with allegiances."

"People's fates are simplified by their names."

"Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous."

"Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past."

"Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim."

"Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper."

"Seizing and incorporating...There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive."

"Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence."

"Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true."

"Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf."

"The blind man is not blind by birth, but he became blind with little effort. He has a camera, he takes it everywhere, and he just loves keeping his eyes closed. He walks about as though asleep, he has seen absolutely nothing as yet, and already he is shooting it, for when all things lie next to one another, equally small, equally large, always rectangular, orderly, cut off, named, numbered, proven and demonstrated, then you can see them much better in any event. The blind man saves himself the trouble of viewing anything beforehand. He gathers the things he would have seen and piles them up and enjoys them as though they were stamps. He travels all over the world for the sake of his camera, nothing is far enough, shiny enough, strange enough—he gets it for the camera. He says: I was there, and he points to it, and if he could not point at it he would not know where he had been, the world is confusing, exotic, rich, who can retain it all."

"The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind."

"The eyes are very beautiful unsustainable, we must always look at them, you drown in, you get lost, you do not know where you are."

"The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness."

"The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring."

"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well."

"The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket."

"The lack of knowledge on knowledge must not become impoverished."

"The once-seen does not exist yet. The always seen no longer exists."

"The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation."

"The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble."

"The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer."

"The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand."

"The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure."

"The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste."

"There are books that we have our next twenty years without reading them, books that we turn away, we carry from one city to another, from one country to another, carefully packaged, although there is very little room, and maybe browsed in the time of removal from the case, however, we keep very well-read even one complete sentence. Then, after twenty years, there comes a time when, suddenly, as if we were under pressure from higher imperative, we can not do anything but pick up a book and read these in one sitting, from beginning to end : this book acts as a revelation. At that time we know why we have done so much attention. He had to take place, it had to be a burden, and now has reached the goal of his journey, now raises his flight, now illuminates the twenty years in which he has lived moved to our side. Could not say so much if I had not moved during this time, and what idiot would argue that the book was always the same."

"The unconscious, which those who always speak of it least possess."

"There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight."

"Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth."

"Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travelers are heartless."

"There is something fluid about [packs] during the course of any individual manifestation. [p. 127]"

"There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth."

"We have no standard any more for anything, ever since human life is no longer the standard."

"There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure."

"When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak."

"What a man touched upon, he should take with him. If he forgot it, he should be reminded. What gives a man worth is that he incorporates everything he has experienced. This includes the countries where he has lived, the people whose voices he has heard. It also takes in his origins, if he can find out something about them... not only one’s private experience but everything concerning the time and place of one’s beginnings. The words of a language one may have spoken and heard only as a child imply the literature in which it flowered. The story of a banishment must include everything that happened before it as well as the rights subsequently claimed by the victims. Others had fallen before and in different ways; they too are part of the story. It is hard to evaluate the justice of such a claim to history... We should know not only what happened to our fellow men in the past but also what they were capable of. We should know what we ourselves are capable of. For that, much knowledge is needed; from whatever direction, at whatever distance knowledge offers itself, one should reach out for it, keep it fresh, water it and fertilize it with new knowledge."

"Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding."