Diary
Witold Gombrowicz
Top 10 Best Quotes
“If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find. But a critic should not rifle, search. Let him sit back with folded arms, waiting for the book to find him. Talents should not be sought with a microscope, a talent should let people know about itself by striking at all the bells.”
“Listen, nitwit, what good will it do you to know whether I am "sincere" or "insincere"? What does this have to do with whether or not my thoughts are right? I can utter a soaring truth "insincerely" and say the stupidest thing "sincerely". Learn to judge the thought independently of who says it or how.”
“You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.”
“Average intelligence loves blinders, which facilitate an even trot; but a brisker and livelier intelligence desires uncertainty, risk, a play of more deceptive and elusive forces...where one can preserve flight, pride, joke, confession, rapture, play, struggle.”
“Wednesday Wind and spindles of clouds crowding the peaks from the south. A lone chicken pecks away on the lawn.... To be a concrete man. To be an individual. Not to strive to transform the whole world. To live in the world, changing it only as much as possible from within the reach of my nature. To become real in harmony with my needs, my individual needs. I do not want to say that collective and abstract thought, that Humanity as such, are not important. Yet a certain balance must be restored. The most modern direction of is one that will rediscover the individual man.”
“I do not fear that "future generations will not read novels," etc. It is probably a complete misunderstanding to conceive of serious art in categories of production, market, readers, supply and demand(...)art is not the fabrication of stories for readers but a spiritual cohabitation, something so tense and so separate from science, even contradictory to it, that there can be no competition between them. If someone fine, dignified, prolific, brilliant (this is how one ought to speak of artists this is the language art demands) is born in the future, if someone unique and unrepeatable is born, a Bach, a Rembrandt, then he will win people over, charm and seduce them...”
“When you, existentialists, speak to me of consciousness, fear, and nothingness, I burst with laughter not because I don't agree with you, but because I must agree with you. I agreed and, loo and behold, nothing happened...I laugh because I delight in fear, play with nothingness, and toy with responsibility. Death does not exist.”
“We were inclined to believe that the nose was not for the snuff box but the snuff box for the nose.”
“Truth does not make itself real in an abstract contest of ideas, but in a collision of persons. Being condemned to read a fair amount of books filled only with arguments, I know what truth severed from the person is: a laborious truth. And that is why I turn to you with the plea: Do not allow an idea to grow in you at the price of your personality.”
“The history of culture indicates that stupidity is the twin sister of reason, it grows most luxuriously not on the soil of virgin ignorance, but on soil cultivated by the sweat of doctors and professors.”
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Book Keywords:
artists, life-vs-art, intellect, freedom-of-thought, thinking-for-yourself, truth, intelligence, reader, writing, literary-criticism, science, talent, art, writing-philosophy
