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Quotes by Polish Authors
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose."
"The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself."
"Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him."
"Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions."
"Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings."
"The question is not how to get cured, but how to live."
"It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone..."
"What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it."
"Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing."
"He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites and escapes."
"Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it."
"It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing."
"There is a weird power in a spoken word."
"The wilderness had caressed him, and-lo!-he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation."
"The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast."
"And because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the real trouble--the heart pain--the world pain. I tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . . Ja! . . . And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was? Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!"'The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butterflies laughed boisterously."
"All a man can betray is his conscience."
"Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life."
"This grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on."
"To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence."
"As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook."
"I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go."
"This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain..."
"But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition- and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation- and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
"As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs."
"Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags-rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief."
"Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin."
"Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters."
"I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried, I could poke my forefinger through him and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe."
"I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together."
"The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power."
"Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!"
"There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget."
"I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."
"It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge."
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun."
"Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion?"
"No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge."
"Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors..."
"I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew."
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