Witold Gombrowicz > Quotes

“Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Don't be fooled by your own wisdom”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“Rzecz prosta, im mądrzejszy czytelnik, tym i książka okaże się mądrzejsza; im zaś czytelnik głupszy i bardziej jałowy, tym i książka będzie głupsza.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Bacacay

“Great! I've written something stupid, but I haven't signed a contract with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works. I gave vent to my stupidity...and here I am, reborn.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“Wielka Poezja będąc wielką i będąc poezją nie może nie zachwycać nas, a więc zachwyca!”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“Our element is unending immaturity.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“For Kierkegaard, for Heidegger, for Sartre, the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. They measure honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness? Doesn't awareness--that forced, extreme awareness--arise among us, not from us, as something created by effort, the mutual perfecting of ourselves in it, the confirming of something that one philosopher forces onto another? Isn't man, therefore, in his private reality, something childish and always beneath his own awareness? And doesn't he feel awareness to be, at the same time, something alien, imposed and unimportant? If this is how it is, this furtive childhood, this concealed degradation are ready to explode your systems sooner or later.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary: Volume 1

“Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos

“You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't--I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and--no matter how difficult it would have been--made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have--yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“W polowie drogi mojego zywota posrod ciemnego znalazlem sie lasu. Las ten co gorsza byl zielony.”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“Joey, it's high time, dear child. What will people say? If you don't want to be a doctor, at least be a womanizer, or a fancier of horses, be something... be something definite...”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Dzieje kultury wykazują, ze głupota jest siostrą bliźniaczą rozumu, ona rośnie najbujniej nie na glebie dziewiczej ignorancji , lecz na gruncie uprawnym siódmym potem doktorów i profesorów. Wielkie absurdy nie są wymyślane przez tych, których rozum krząta się wokół spraw codziennych. Nic dziwnego zatem, że właśnie najintensywniejsi myśliciele bywali producentami największego głupstwa. / The history of culture shows that foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom. It does not flourish on the fields of pure ignorance but on the fields tirelessly plowed by doctors and professors. Great absurdities do not flourish where one is busy with everyday life. No wonder that sometimes most vigorous thinkers come up with utmost stupidities. (Dziennik 1956, XIX, Thursday)”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“Homeland is not a blot on a map but the living essence of man”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“I am a collection of the family's body parts.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed. ”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“If he [the Artist] were to take up the pen it would be...to better express his individuality and explain it to others; or else to put his internal affairs in order...to deepen and sharpen his relationship with his fellow men because other souls exert an immense and creative influence on our soul; or to try to fight for a world as he would like it to be, for a world that is indispensable to his life.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“Many a beauty in her own room behaves repulsively till one splits one's sides.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“I even stopped walking to give some thought to the fact that everyone, after all, wants to be himself, so I too want to be myself, for example who would love syphilis, of course no one loves syphilis, but after all, a syphilitic man also wants to be himself, namely a syphilitic, it is easy to say "I want to be well again," and yet it sounds strange, as if to say "I don't want to be who I am.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos

“Istnieje gatunek zjawisk, których dżentelmen nie może znać z tej przyczyny, że gdyby je poznał, przestałby być dżentelmenem.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ivona, Princess of Burgundia

“To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today. ”
― Witold Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament

“(…) jest naiwnością mniemanie, jakoby zachwyt nasz wobec dzieła sztuki z nas samych pochodził: że zachwyt ten w sporej mierze nie rodzi się z ludzi, ale między ludźmi, i jest to tak jakbyśmy wzajemnie zmuszali się do zachwytu (choć nikt „osobiście” nie jest zachwycony). / It is naive to believe that the admiration for a masterpiece is spontaneous. The admiration, to a great extent, is not born within people but between people, as if we forced each other to admire (while no one is “personally” enraptured). (Dziennik, 1956, XX, Wtorek I)”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary: Volume 1

“Why, my man is created from the outside, that is, he is inauthentic in essence- he is always not-himself, because he is determined by form, which is born between people. His "I", therefore, is marked for him in that "interhumanity." An eternal actor, but a natural one, because his artificiality is inborn, it makes up a feature of his humanity-to be a man means to be an actor-to be a man means to pretend to be a man-to be a man means to "act like" a man while not being one deep inside-to be a man is to recite humanity.”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“The individual is a nut so impossible to crack that no theoretic tooth will be able to manage it. And so nothing will be able to justify your defeat, bumblers!”
― Witold Gombrowicz