Quote collection
464 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything."
"When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all."
"For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it."
"There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?"
"To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while."
"We are possessed by the things we possess. When I like an object, I always give it to someone. It isn't generosity-it's only because I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me."
"The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question."
"There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck."
"Man must be invented each day"
"No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point."
"What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?"
"A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."
"It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are."
"That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget."
"This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell."
"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."
"I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence"
"I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's."
"As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become."
"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews."