Diary 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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz , Diary

“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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“Cuvintele lui Cioran răspândesc umezeala pivnițelor și putreziciunea mormintelor, dar sunt prea meschine. (...) Tot ce are comun un literat, fie el și de un mai mic calibru, cu Kafka, Conrad sau Mickiewicz, ceea ce este talent autentic sau autentică superioritate sau autentică maturitate - nu are ce căuta în ”pivnița” lui Cioran. Aș vrea să-i reamintesc lui Cioran că nu numai arta în exil, ci, în genere, orice fel de artă se află în cea mai strânsă relație cu descompunerea, se naște din decadență, este preschimbarea maladiei în sănătate. Și orice artă, în general, vine în atingere cu ridicolul, înfrângerea, umilința. Oare să existe un artist, care să nu fie, așa cum spune Cioran, ”o făptură plină de ambiție, agresivă în căderea sa, un ins dezamăgit dublat de un cuceritor”? Oare a văzut vreodată Cioran un artist, un scriitor, care să nu fie, să nu fie nevoit să fie un megaloman? Și arta, așa cum a spus cândva pe bună dreptate Boy, este un uriaș cimitir: din o mie de indivizi care n-au reușit să se realizeze, menținându-se în zona unei dureroase insuficiențe, doar unul sau doi vor reuși cu adevărat ”să existe”. Așadar, această murdărie, veninul acestor ambiții înșelate, zbaterea aceasta în gol, această catastrofă nu au prea multe în comun cu emigrarea, și destule cu arta - constituie trăsătura caracteristică a oricărei cafenele literare și este cu adevărat destul de indiferent în ce parte a lumii se chinuie niște scriitori, care nu sunt de ajuns de scriitori pentru a fi cu adevărat scriitori.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“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...”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“In a universe more and more abstract, it is up to us to make sure that the human voice does not cease to be heard.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“Ah! I knew the masculinity that they, men, fabricated among themselves, goading eachother into it, mutually forcing themselves to it in a panic-stricken fear at the woman in themselves. I knew men straining to attain Masculinity, convlsed males, giving each other lessons in manliness. This type of manartificially magnified his traits: he exaggerated this heaviness, brutality, strength, and seriousness, and in it was he who raped, conguered by force. He was affraid, thereforece, of beauty and grace, which are the weapons of weakness, he lost himself in male monstrosity and was becoming licentious and trivial or dull and clumsy.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“The artist, according to Freud, is a neurotic who treats himself, I guess because no one else can.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“Contempt? What! I adore women! Yet it is true that until now I have not been able to figure out what they are to me in the spiritual order of things, enemies or allies? And this means that half of humanity is eluding my grasp.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“I am amazed that you talk to one another at all. Each of you is a different solution to the human face and personifies a different understanding of man. If a bearded man is okay, then a clean-shaven or mustached one is a monster, a clown, a degenerate, and a general absurdity; and if a clean-shaven man is the right type, then a bearded one is a monstrosity, sloppiness, nonsense, and foulness. Well then! What are you waiting for? Start punching!”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“I write this diary reluctantly. Its dishonest honesty wearies me. For whom am I writing? If I am writing for myself, then why is it being published? If for the reader, who do I pretend that I am talking to myself? Are you talking to yourself so that others hear you?”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“No one really knew what was being played because the perfection of the pianist did not allow one to concentrate on Brahms, and the perfection of Brahms drew attention away from the pianist. But he got there. Applause. The applause of the knowledgable. The applause of amateurs. The applause of the ignorant. The applause of the herd. Applause incited by applause. Applause feeding on itself, pilling onto itself, exciting, creating applause. And no one could NOT clap because everyone was clapping.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“When talking to a Communist, don't you have the impression that you are speaking to a "beleiver"? For a Communist, too, everything is taken care of, at least in the current phase of the dialectical process. He is in possission of the truth he knows. And, what is more, he believes, and what is still more, he wants to believe. Even if you could prove otherwise to him, he will not be convinced, because he has given himself up to the Party. The Party knows better, the Party knows for him.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“atavisms,”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“sybaritism”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“I can say without exaggeration that I “devoted myself” to literature. For me, literature is not a matter of a career and future monuments but the excavating from myself of the maximum value of which I am capable. If it were to turn out that that which I write is inconsequential, then I am defeated not only as a writer but as a man.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“An excessive respect for scientific truth has obscured our own truth. In our eagerness to understand reality, we forget that we are not here to understand reality, but only to express it. We, art, are reality. Art is a fact and not commentary attached to fact.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“It seems to me that here, accidentally, I have betrayed the greatest and ultimate secret of style: we have to know how to delight in the word. If literature generally dares to speak, it is not at all because it is certain of its truth, but only because it is certain of its delight.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“Kad taip toje pralekiančių prasimanymų karalystėje ga­lėtum išgirsti tikrovės balsą! Bet ne – arba penkiolikos metų senumo aidai, arba išmoktos giesmės. Tėvynės spauda, trauk­dama privalomą gaidą, tyli kaip kapas, kaip praraja, kaip pa­slaptis, o emigracinė spauda – padori. Be abejonės, mūsų dvasia emigracijoje tapo labai tauri. Emigracijos spauda primena ligoninę, kurioje sveikstamieji gauna tik lengvai virš­kinamos sriubytės. Kam aitrinti senas žaizdas? Kam dar labiau apkartinti gyvenimą, tarytum tų sunkumų dar mažai būtume patyrę? Ir beje – argi, gavę lupti, neprivalėtume elg­tis mandagiai?.. Tad klesti čia visos krikščioniškos dorybės, gerumas, žmoniškumas, gailestingumas, pagarba žmogui, sai­kingumas, kuklumas, dorumas, apdairumas, protingumas, ir visa tai, kas čia rašoma, pirmiausiai yra geranoriška. Šitiek do­rybių! Nebūtume tokie dorybių įsikūnijimai, jei tvirčiau sto­vėtume ant kojų. Aš nepasitikiu nevykėlių dorybe, dorybe iš vargo, ir visa toji moralė primena man Nietzsche’s žodžius: „Papročių sušvelnėjimas yra mūsų silpnumo padarinys“.

Priešingai nei emigracijos, tėvynės balsas skamba garsiai ir kategoriškai, net sunku patikėti, kad tai nėra teisybės ir gy­venimo balsas. Čia bent jau viskas aišku – juoda ir balta, blo­ga ir gera, čia moralė skamba garsiai ir muša kaip lazda. Ta giesmė skambėtų nuostabiai, jei giedotojų ji negąsdintų ir jei nevirpėtų jų keliantys gailestį balsai... Milžiniškoje tyloje for­muojasi mūsų nešlovinga, nebyli, užkimšta gerkle tikrovė.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“And the ridiculous impotence of words in the face of life!”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“We were inclined to believe that the nose was not for the snuff box but the snuff box for the nose.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“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.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary