Quote collection
410 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers."
"loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
"People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end."
"In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable."
"Optimism is the opium of the people."
"Happiness is the longing for repetition."
"How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."
"she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
"Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death."
"It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth."
"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."
"Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile."
"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together."
"Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously."
"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch."
"The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other."
"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."
"Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound."