Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
youth is a marvelous garment
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Real worship involves waiting.
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.
Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Being in love is an exhausting business.
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.
The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.
Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
We can only learn to love by loving.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.
evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.
Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.
It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.
Anything that consoles is fake.
The best thing about being God would be making the heads.
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.
... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.
Most real relationships are involuntary.
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
